A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film 9780470671641, 0470671645

Citation preview

A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film

A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film Edited by

Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

This edition first published 2015 © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc, excepting Chapter 1 © 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota and Chapter 19 © 2007 Wayne State University Press Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to contemporary documentary film / edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow.   pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-470-67164-1 (cloth)   1.  Documentary films–History and criticism.  I.  Juhasz, Alexandra, editor.  II.  Lebow, Alisa, editor.   PN1995.9.D6C543 2015  070.1′8–dc23 2014031042 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover image: The Day of the Sparrow, directed by Philip Scheffner (Germany, 2010. Produced by ARTE, Blinker Filmproduktion, Pong, Worklights Media, and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF)) Set in 10.5/13pt Minion by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

1 2015

Contents

Notes on Contributors

ix

Introduction: A World Encountered Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

1

Part I  Planet Juan Francisco Salazar

19

Introduction Juan Francisco Salazar

21

1 Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil Documentaries Imre Szeman

28

2 Anticipatory Modes of Futuring Planetary Change in  Documentary Film Juan Francisco Salazar

43

3 Projecting Sea Level Rise: Documentary Film and Other Geolocative Technologies Janet Walker

61

Part II  Migration Anikó Imre

87

Introduction Anikó Imre

89

4 Videogeographies Ursula Biemann

92

vi Contents 5 Rates of Exchange: Human Trafficking and the Global Marketplace Leshu Torchin

108

6 Documenting What? Auto-Theory and Migratory Aesthetics Mieke Bal

124

Part III  Work Silke Panse

145

Introduction Silke Panse

147

7 The Work of the Documentary Protagonist: The Material Labor of Aesthetics Silke Panse

155

8 Old School Capitalism in Post-Socialism: The Struggles of Želimir Žilnik’s Workers Ewa Mazierska

176

9 Capturing the Labors of Sex Work: The Pedagogical Role of Documentary Film Anna E. Ward

191

Part IV  Sex Laura Hyun Yi Kang

209

Introduction Laura Hyun Yi Kang

211

10 Documentary Practice and Transnational Feminist Theory: The Visibility of FGC Patricia White

217

11 Transforming Terror: Documentary Poetics in Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita Extraviada (2001) Rosa-Linda Fregoso

233

12 Reading Realness: Paris Is Burning, Wildness, and Queer and Transgender Documentary Practice Eve Oishi

252

Part V  Virus Bishnupriya Ghosh

271

Introduction Bishnupriya Ghosh

273



Contents 

vii

13 Animating Informatics: Scientific Discovery Through Documentary Film280 Kirsten Ostherr 14 HIV on Documentary Television in Post-Apartheid South Africa Rebecca Hodes

298

15 Digital AIDS Documentary: Webs, Rooms, Viruses, and Quilts Alexandra Juhasz

314

Part VI  Religion Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow Introduction Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow 16 Rising in the East, Sett(l)ing in the West: The Emergence of Buddhism as Contemporary Documentary Subject Angelica Fenner

335 337

341

17 The New Religious Wave in Israeli Documentary Cinema: Negotiating Jewish Fundamentalism During the Second Intifada366 Raya Morag 18 Tran Van Thuy’s Story of Kindness: Spirituality and Political Discourse Dean Wilson

384

Part VII  War Jeffrey Skoller

401

Introduction Jeffrey Skoller

403

19 Second Thoughts on “The Production of Outrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition” Jane M. Gaines

410

20 One, Two, Three Montages … Harun Farocki’s War Documentaries Nora M. Alter

431

21 The Unwar Film Alisa Lebow

454

Part VIII  Torture Alisa Lebow Introduction Alisa Lebow

475 477

viii Contents 22 (In)visible Evidence: The Representability of Torture Susana de Sousa Dias 23 Interviewing the Devil: Interrogating Masters of the Cambodian Genocide Deirdre Boyle

482

506

24 The Female Perpetrator: La Flaca Alejandra and Operation Atropos524 Macarena Gómez-Barris 25 Toward the Dark Side: Seeing Detainee Bodies in Documentary Film Anjali Nath

Part IX  Surveillance Elizabeth Cowie Introduction Elizabeth Cowie

536

557 559

26 Architectures of Control and Points of Resistance: Surveillance Culture and Digital Documentaries Sharon Lin Tay

566

27 The World Viewed: Documentary Observing and the Culture of Surveillance Elizabeth Cowie

580

28 Surveillance in the Service of Narrative Brian Winston

611

29 Face Blind: Documentary Media and Subversion of Surveillance Patrik Sjöberg

629

Index647

Notes on Contributors

Nora M. Alter is Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996), Projecting History: Non-Fiction German Film (2002), Chris Marker (2006), and co-editor with Lutz Koepnick of Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004). She is completing a book on the international essay film. Mieke Bal, a renowned cultural theorist and critic, is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to seventeenth-century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism, migratory culture, and mental illness. Her many books include Thinking in Film and Endless Andness (both 2013), Of What One Cannot Speak (2010), A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002), and Narratology (3rd edition, 2009). Mieke is also a video artist, and made a series of experimental documentaries. She made the video installation Nothing is Missing (2006–2011) that continues to be displayed. Her first fiction film A Long History of Madness, and exhibitions derived from it, have toured internationally (with Michelle Williams Gamaker). Her current video project is a series of installations and a feature film, Madame B, loosely based on Flaubert’s masterpiece, also with Michelle Williams Gamaker. Her co-curated group exhibition “2MOVE: Video, Art, Migration” traveled to four countries. www.miekebal.org Ursula Biemann is an artist, writer, and video essayist based in Zurich. She investigates global relations under the impact of the accelerated mobility of people, resources, and information. Major art projects on oil and water include Black Sea Files (2005), Egyptian Chemistry (2012), and Deep Weather (2013). She conducts research at the Zurich University for the Arts and Michigan State University, and is publisher of several books. Her video installations have been exhibited worldwide in museums and at the international art biennials of Liverpool, Sharjah, Shanghai,

x

Notes on Contributors

Sevilla, and Istanbul. She was appointed Doctor honoris causa in Humanities by Umeå University, Sweden (2008) and received the 2009 Prix Meret Oppenheim, the national art award of Switzerland. www.geobodies.org Deirdre Boyle is Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School for Public Engagement in New York and former director of their Graduate Certificate in Documentary Studies. She is author of Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited (1997), among other books, and essays in Afterimage, Cineaste, Frameworks, The Independent, Millennium Film Journal, Short Film Studies, The Village Voice, and Wide Angle, among other journals. Elizabeth Cowie is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. She was co-founder and co-editor in the 1970s of m/f a journal of feminist theory, and published Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, in 1997. She has subsequently written on film noir, on the horror of the horror film, and on the cinematic dream-work. In Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (2011) she addresses documentary film as the serious, as spectacle, and as an art of the real. She published “On Documentary Sounds and Images in the Gallery,” Screen, 50 (Spring 2009), and more recently, “Documentary Space, Place, and Landscape” on the documentary imaging of the politics of landscape in the online journal Media Fields (2011). Forthcoming work includes essays on documentary and surveillance, on voting, and on gesture in film. Susana de Sousa Dias is a filmmaker and professor at the University of Lisbon. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts-Audiovisual, a Master’s in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, and Bachelor degrees in Fine Arts-Painting (University of Lisbon) and Cinema (National Film and Theatre School). She also attended the National Music Conservatory. She has lectured widely on documentary, art, and cinema. In 2012 and 2013 she was a co-director of the International Film Festival Doclisboa. In 2001, she founded the production company, Kintop. Her latest films Natureza Morta (Still Life, 2006, 72 min., Atalanta Films Award Doclisboa, Merit Prize Taiwan IDF) and 48 (2009, 93 min., Grand Prix at Cinéma du Réel, FIPRESCI Award at Dok Leipzig, among other prizes) have been shown in festivals, screenings, and art galleries worldwide. Stilleben, an installation on three screens, and Obscure Light are her most recent works. Angelica Fenner is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and German and Graduate Coordinator in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Race Under Reconstruction in German Cinema (2011), co-editor with Robin Curtis of The Autobiographical Turn in Germanophone Documentary and Experimental Film (2014), and has published diverse articles, interviews, and reviews in anthologies and journals that reflect her sustained interests in European diasporic cinemas and contemporary documentary theory and practice. Rosa-Linda Fregoso is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer. She is the author of six books and edited collections, including Terrorizing Women:



Notes on Contributors

xi

Feminicide in the Américas, co-edited with Cynthia Bejarano (2012); meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (2003); and Lourdes Portillo: The Devil Never Sleeps and Other Films by Lourdes Portillo (2001). Fregoso is currently the Interim Chair and Professor of the Latin American and Latino Studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her writing and teaching reflect her research interest in human rights, culture, and feminism. Her publications cover issues of human rights, feminicide and gender violence, media and visual arts, race, cultural politics, and aesthetics, in the Americas. As a member of the editorial collective, Fregoso writes for the online news site, The Feminist Wire. Jane M. Gaines is Professor of Film, Columbia University and author of two awardwinning books, Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law, and Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era, and is completing Pink Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industry?, a companion to the web-based Women Film Pioneers Project, http://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu. One of the founders of the Visible Evidence conference and co-editor of Collecting Visible Evidence, the author continues to critique the “critique of realism,” but most recently in Film History also critiques the “historical turn” in film and media studies. Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches post-colonial theory, literature, and global media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Much of her scholarly work, including the two books, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (2004) and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (2011), investigate contemporary cultures of globalization. She is currently working on two monographs on speculative knowledge: a book on spectral materialism in global cinemas (The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization) and a comparative study of pandemic media in the United States, South Africa, and India (The Virus Touch: Living with Epidemics). Macarena Gómez-Barris is Associate Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and Sociology at the University of Southern California. She is author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009) and co-editor with Herman Gray of Toward a Sociology of a Trace (2010). Her current work is on decolonial memory in the Andes. Rebecca Hodes is a medical historian based at the AIDS and Society Research Unit, University of Cape Town. Her current work focuses on science, race, and sex in South African history. She is the principal investigator of the Mzantsi Wakho study, about adolescent adherence to antiretroviral treatment and sexual and reproductive health. The study is part of International AIDS Society’s Collaborative Initiative for Pediatric HIV Education and Research. Her book, Broadcasting the Pandemic: A History of HIV on South African Television, was published by the Human Sciences Research Council Press in 2014.

xii

Notes on Contributors

Anikó Imre is an Associate Professor of Critical Studies and the Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice Doctoral Program (iMAP) at the School of Cinematic Arts of the University of Southern California. She has published widely on media globalization, (post)socialism, and identities. She is the author of Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Post-Communist Media Cultures (2009), editor of East European Cinemas (2005) and The Blackwell Companion to East European Cinemas (2012), and co-editor of Transnational Feminism in Film and Media (2007) and Popular Television in the New Europe (2012); of special issues of The Journal of Popular Film and Television on Television Entertainment in the New Europe (2012), the European Journal of Cultural Studies on Media Globalization and Post-Socialist Identities (May 2009), and of Feminist Media Studies on Transcultural Feminist Mediations (December 2009). She co-edits the Palgrave book series Global Cinemas and sits on the editorial boards of the journals Television and New Media, NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies, and Studies in East European Cinema. Alexandra Juhasz is Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She is the author of AIDS TV (1995), Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (2001), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, co-edited with Jesse Lerner (2005), Learning from YouTube (2011) and is currently editing, with Yvonne Welbon, Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of AfricanAmerican Lesbian Filmmaking. Dr. Juhasz is also the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy. Her current work is on and about feminist Internet culture including YouTube (www.aljean.wordpress.com) and feminist pedagogy and community (www.feministonlinespaces.com; http:// femtechnet.newschool.edu). Laura Hyun Yi Kang is Associate Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies, English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (2002) and the forthcoming books, The Traffic in Asian Women and The Stakes of Interdisciplinarity. Kang has also published essays in American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Journal of Asian American Studies, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, Positions: East Asian Cultures Critique, and Visual Anthropology Review. Alisa Lebow is a Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. Lebow has published widely on aspects of documentary film with a focus on “the political,” as well as on subjectivity and the first person modality in documentary. Her books include The Cinema of Me (2012) and First Person Jewish (2008). She is the recipient of numerous grants, including research fellowships from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust. Originally a ­filmmaker, her films include Outlaw (1994), Treyf (1998), and For the Record: The



Notes on Contributors

xiii

World Tribunal on Iraq (2007). Her most recent project is an interactive documentary website called Filming Revolution. Ewa Mazierska is Professor of Contemporary Cinema at the University of Central Lancashire. She is author of numerous books, including European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory and Politics (2011) and Masculinities in Polish, Czech and Slovak Cinema: Black Peters and Men of Marble (2009). She is principal editor of Studies in Eastern European Cinema. Her monograph on representation of work in European cinema is forthcoming from Berghahn in 2015. Raya Morag is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the Department of Communication and Journalism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the Aftermath of War (2009) and Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema (2013). Anjali Nath is an Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut. She holds an appointment in both the Center for American Studies and Research as well as in Media Studies. Her research examines the visual culture of military detention during the War on Terror. Eve Oishi is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University. Some of her articles include “I-Hotel” (2014), “Collective Orgasm: The Ecocyberpornography of Shu Lea Cheang” (2007), “Screen Memories: Fakeness in Asian American Media Practice” (2006), and “Visual Perversions: Race, Sex, and Cinematic Pleasure” (2006). Kirsten Ostherr is Professor of English at Rice University, where she teaches film and media studies, focusing on health and medical visualizations. She is author of Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (2005), and Medical Visions: Producing the Patient Through Film, Television and Imaging Technologies (2013). Silke Panse is Lecturer for Fine Art at the University for the Creative Arts, United Kingdom. She writes about documentary moving images in relation to eco-­ aesthetics, art, television, and continental philosophy in Third Text (2006), Reading CSI (2007), Rethinking Documentary (2008), Blind Movies (2009), Marx at the Movies (2014), and Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (2013). She coedited A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television (2014), which includes her chapter “The Judging Spectator in the Image.” She was co-investigator of the Screening Nature Network (2013–14), funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. She wrote her doctoral thesis mostly about Werner Herzog’s documentaries and organized the conference “Werner Herzog’s Cinema Between the Visionary and the Documentary” (2005).

xiv

Notes on Contributors

Juan Francisco Salazar is a Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, where he is also a researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society. He has contributed a wide array of scholarly articles and essays on indigenous media in Latin America, citizens’ and community media, and environmental communication and ­ advocacy. He is co-author with Hart Cohen and Iqbal Barkat of Screen Media Arts: Introduction to Concepts and Practices (2008). As a media practitioner he has produced several documentaries, experimental short films, and video ­installations exhibited internationally. His current projects are concerned with anthropologies of life in Antarctica where he is developing ethnographic and media work around speculative futures. Patrik Sjöberg is Assistant Professor at Karlstad University. His research investigates the shared territories between experimental film cultures and the discourse surrounding documentary media. Publications in English include the book The World in Pieces – On Compilation Film (2001) and the articles or chapters “A Mirror With a Memory: On the Relation Between Camera-Produced Images and Memory” (2005); ”I Am Here, or, the Art of Getting Lost: Patrick Keiller and the New City Symphony” (2011). To be published: “Ich bin Fassbinder – Fassbinder and the Autobiographical gesture” (2014) and “Performing Autobiographical Gestures: The Politics of Mediated Selves in Documentary Media” (2014). Jeffrey Skoller is a writer and filmmaker and has made over a dozen films that have been exhibited internationally. Screenings and exhibitions include: The Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum, New York; P.S. 1, New York; Flaherty Film Seminar, New York; Arsenal Kino, Berlin; Mannheim Film Festival, Germany; The Latin American Film Festival, Havana; National Film Theatre, London. His essays and articles have appeared in books, artist catalogues, and in journals including Film Quarterly, Discourse, Afterimage, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Cinematograph, among others. He is the author of two books, Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film (2005) and POSTWAR: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg (2010). Skoller is currently Associate Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Imre Szeman is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and Professor of English, Film Studies, and Sociology at the University of Alberta. He conducts research on and teaches in the areas of social and cultural theory, film and visual culture, globalization and nationalism, and Canadian studies. He is the founder of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies and a founding member of the US Cultural Studies Association. Szeman is founding editor of Reviews in Cultural Theory and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Mediations. Current projects include: a book on the cultural politics of oil; an edited collection on energy, history, and politics; and a major companion to critical and cultural theory.



Notes on Contributors

xv

Sharon Lin Tay is a Senior Lecturer in Film at Middlesex University. She writes widely about film and digital media cultures, filmmaking practices, documentary, world cinema, and film theory. She is the author of Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (2009). Leshu Torchin is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film Video and the Internet (2012); co-author with William Brown and Dina Iordanova of Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe (2010); and coeditor of and contributor to Film Festivals and Activism (2012). Her work has also appeared in Third Text, Film & History, American Anthropologist, and Souciant, an online magazine of culture and politics. Janet Walker is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also affiliated with the Feminist Studies and Comparative Literature Programs and the Environmental Media Initiative of the Carsey-Wolf Center. Her writings in the areas of feminist historiography, documentary film, and trauma studies have been published in journals including Screen and Continuum, and she is author or editor of books including Westerns: Films Through History (2001); Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (2005); and Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (with Bhaskar Sarkar, 2009). Walker lectures internationally and co-directs a local community project, “Video Portraits of Survival,” to create expressive videos and archival material from the testimony and encounters of refugees and rescuers of the Holocaust. Her current project is a book about documentary, geography, and environment. Anna E. Ward is a Lecturer in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Her work has appeared in Camera Obscura, Social Psychology Quarterly, The Scholar and the Feminist, and American Quarterly. Her current book project examines representations of flirtation in queer media. Patricia White is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College. She is the author of UnInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (1999) and of numerous articles and chapters on women’s and LGBTQ cinema. She is co-author with Timothy Corrigan of The Film Experience (3rd edition, 2012) and co-editor with Corrigan and Meta Mazaj of Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings (2010). She has served on the editorial collective of the feminist film journal Camera Obscura and the board of Women Make Movies. Her new book on global women’s filmmaking in the twenty-first century is forthcoming in 2014. Dean Wilson is a Guest Professor at the University of Montreal, Department of Art History and Cinema Studies. As a cinema policy consultant he created the first film degree programs at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi, under

xvi

Notes on Contributors

a major grant from the Ford Foundation. He received his PhD in French from the City University of New York Graduate Center, writing on the colonial film history of Vietnam. Brian Winston is the Lincoln Professor at the School of Journalism, University of Lincoln. He is the editor of The Documentary Film Book (2013) and author of A Right to Offend (2012).

Introduction

A World Encountered Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

There is no formal element, or set of elements to which all documentaries adhere, just as there is no particular aesthetic characteristic. Even if we can agree that the majority of documentaries – though certainly not all, nor most of the more innovative ones – may be identified by certain well-worn practices, such as the talking head interview or voice-over narration, we accept what has become a commonplace within the field of documentary studies: that documentary defies definition. Our anthology does not attempt to distinguish documentary from other types of film, or fetishize the search for its elusive origins, defining characteristics, or great auteurs. Rather, we dedicate this contribution to those documentaries, scholars, and artists who use its many forms out of a passionate commitment to and direct engagement with the lived world, just as we hope that this anthology’s production and reception can be part of that particular documentary tradition. Since its first manifestations arising variously and with varying effects in Europe and North America, documentary has relied upon this aura of, and actual ­engagement with, the world. Whether attempting to salvage a dying culture, impact policy, or foment the revolutionary spirit, documentary’s beginnings were tied to events in the world and commentary on the world, as is true today. One of the more stubborn concepts to stick to these varied filmmaking practices is this commitment to a direct engagement with a world encountered by the filmmaker – be it as a flyon-the-wall observer, a vérité investigator, a poetic commentator, or a committed or reflexive participant. While not all documentaries are obligated to engage with the issues of the age, we find when surveying today’s field that documentary is still one of the key modes of cultural expression that intervenes in, and indeed goes some way to construct, not just our understanding of events in this world, but A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

2

Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

perhaps even the world itself. Using this rubric, it seemed logical to organize this volume thematically around some of the major issues affecting the world today to which documentary has powerfully, and at times quite influentially, turned its lens with a spirited commitment to engage and even to change. In this respect, our volume differs from other recent publications. We believe that documentary studies suddenly finds itself in its maturity, if the significant number of recent monographs and edited anthologies attempting to encapsulate the field are any indication.1 Given the fine work that has already been done by so many of our esteemed colleagues, the impetus of this volume is to not replicate their efforts. Rather than attempting to define or refine anew the field or its history, auteurs, and canonical texts, we have chosen to open up avenues for close study and debate about documentary’s world-changing aspirations. We hope that the structure of the anthology itself then becomes a model for further real-world applications; we ­envision how the book contributes towards documentary study and conversations that can continue to flourish in relation to an open-ended list of similarly salient real-world topics raised by documentary films, their filmmakers and associated communities, and the scholars who write about them. In other words, we imagined and have ultimately produced a volume that takes the lived world as its inspiration and hopes to reflect on and produce, in turn, some real-world effects. Comprised of 29 challenging essays, this Companion is organized around nine thematic strands, each containing three or four essays and an introduction written by the theme editor. Our unique production structure for this book began when the two of us proposed a set of themes and then approached a set of prominent scholars in the field to serve as theme editors. Emboldened by their overwhelmingly positive response, we understood quickly that there was something innovative about the structure and that it could potentially produce a truly unique volume. They each chose a theme that spoke to them and agreed to organize its coverage as interpreted by them, commissioning three or four original (and in two cases, reprinted) essays for their chosen theme. Rather than always resorting to predictable texts from well-known filmmakers who might be found working in dominant regions of documentary production, we encouraged our editors to seek out authors who would write on the texts that best expanded ideas about a given theme. We also encouraged them to include practitioner-theorists, filmmakers who could write about their own work, thus when possible getting filmmakers’ perspectives on their approaches. In this way, the book expanded the reach of contributors well past the circles of the usual suspects and even beyond areas of study that we each habituate. We then worked closely with the theme editors, and eventually with the authors themselves, in shaping the outcome of this experiment in academic publication. In addition to selecting authors and editing their essays, we asked our theme editors to remain mindful not only of the political and ideological implications by which the theme may be treated, but also of the diversity of aesthetic approaches as well as geographical and cultural positionalities that make up the contemporary media environment. Thus, our dual goal was to treat those films deserving of attention based on the topic or issue they represent, as well as to attend to the innovative ways

Introduction3 in which they represent it. We asked our theme editors to give consideration to new formal strategies, and to try to give space to films that may not be well known to our readership, thereby seeking out at least some writers who would be versed in  ­non-dominant or non-Western practices and/or who could treat experimental ­documentary practices and more challenging modes than the standard fare. All of our editors and authors brought an attentiveness to documentary studies itself, thus creating a meta-commentary on the state of the field while making a direct ­contribution to it. As just one example, Eve Oishi, in her discussion of Wildness (Wu Tsang, 2012) explains how the film “helps us to understand how documentary ­conventions intersect with questions of representation endemic to changing formulations of queer identity and community.” In other words, our aim for this anthology was to have a strong collection of essays that not only looked at innovative films but looked at them in innovative ways. And in this, the volume has far exceeded our expectations, thanks to the shared vision of our theme editors and the myriad insights of our excellent authors. In order to foster fresh approaches, we devised a new model of scholarly collaboration, entailing not only the commissioning of theme editors, thereby creating a dynamic pyramid organization for the production of this book, but also devising a strategy that would engender a sense of communal dialogue, by bringing the authors of the volume together at an early stage in its production, to workshop their drafts within their themes and with the group at large. We hope that this process, and the essays that result from our iterative and dialogic project, is itself demonstrative. The idea was to multiply the internal resonances within the volume while minimizing unnecessary repetition. For students and teachers engaging with this publication, each theme becomes a potential unit that links social issues to alternating questions about documentary form, history, and theory. For scholars, we hope that our method reveals the intellectual expansiveness of the field and approaches to it: open to encounter new forms and formats, to think against or outside ready givens, and to link approaches, texts, and interpretations in ways that are evocative rather than prescriptive. Our themes are meant to be broad and provocative, not exhaustive or limiting, inviting further discussion and research about pressing socio-political phenomena of today’s world, its changing documentary forms, and what our linked roles might be as citizens, scholars, activists, teachers, and/or artists. We could, of course, imagine many other themes that would have worked fruitfully for a project of this nature, and indeed hope that this method might be taken up by others in relation to a range of topics not touched upon in this already ample volume. We briefly list here the themes treated in this book and the approaches taken by the editors and authors who address them. You will note that many of these themes are not new. You may note too, as you engage with the various themes, that there is at times a high degree of overlap, between say, the themes of Migration, Sex, and Work, or amongst War, Surveillance, and Torture. This is because the themes themselves are not meant to be discrete entities but rather are seen as intersections wherein geopolitical and representational forces converge in a nexus of power and resistance. These are the places in which documentary thrives.

4

Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

Part I Planet (edited by Juan Francisco Salazar) We begin the book with the theme “Planet” to put all of the other themes addressed into relief against the overarching issue facing the entire human race (and indeed all living things) today. The future of our planet looms large in the contemporary era, and consequently finds expression in a range of documentary practices; the planet that we inhabit is in the midst of radical change. The fight for dwindling natural resources fuels many of the other phenomena addressed in this Companion, whether Migration, Work, or War. We learn that documentary attends to questions of the environment in myriad ways with varying agendas and degrees of impact. When theme editor Juan Salazar was considering the vastness of the “planetarity,” what Ursula K. Heise (2008) understands as “a sense of planet,” he simultaneously attended to local or micro politics that are sometimes seen as in tension with the macro view. How documentary reports on the problem of peak oil and the social movements concerned with our shift away from oil dependency, is addressed in Imre Szeman’s engaging essay. There are also attempts to develop new ways of analyzing film in this section, such as Janet Walker’s ingenious method of “site seeing,” a term borrowed from Giuliana Bruno, that describes geolocative representations of places and people. Because representing the future – not ­typically an interest in documentary representation – is a key problematic troubling the environmental field, it is appropriate that Juan Salazar looks at documentary’s “futuring” ­potential. The future of our planet will create the necessary conditions for the representation and treatment of all other themes, big and small, or will obviate them altogether. Hence the decision to begin the book with this theme, and to theorize documentary’s place within these discourses.

Part II Migration (edited by Anikó Imre) Easy pathways of and definitive obstacles to economic and political migration define contemporary geographical and representational shifts. Globalization and its receding and replicating borders are definitive problematics for nations, people, and mediamakers who hope to intervene in the world. Migration has many motivations and incarnations, volitional and otherwise, with environmental, geopolitical, technological, and economic forces all playing a role in the increase of both the mobility of populations and the policing of state boundaries. The interactions, as Imre puts it in her introduction, “between moving images and moving people” often enact the phenomena they set out to document, asking documentarians themselves to also move across borders and cultures, bound to a set of ever-shifting laws and regulatory regimes that apply to the camera (and filmmaker) as much as to its migratory object. Thus, in this section of the Companion, we are treated to the thoughts and ideas of filmmakers themselves (Biemann and Bal) as well as those of documentary theorist Leshu Torchin as they, taken together, consider the practices of documenting the migrating subject who travels through today’s hypermediated yet still under-­ documented systems of global transit.

Introduction5

Part III Work (edited by Silke Panse) Once the well-trodden terrain of classical documentary, labor struggles have taken a back seat to many other struggles represented in contemporary documentary, even though they remain a cite of contention worldwide. What are the current demands of labor and what does documentary have to say about them? Indeed, in this era of outsourcing, telecommuting, e-commerce, and virtual environments, what constitutes labor as such? This section interprets labor quite broadly, including, via Silke Panse’s challenging essay, the recognition of the labor of the documentarian and the labor demanded of the subject within the documentary. From the factory to the bedroom, from the laboring body to the virtual worker, the work of documentary is considered as it weighs in on a range of labor disputes and practices, at times, as in the work of Želimir Žilnik discussed by Ewa Mazierska, (re)staging conflicts, and at others, intervening in the distinctions between exploitation and work, as discussed in Anna Ward’s contribution on the representation of sex work.

Part IV Sex (edited by Laura Hyun Yi Kang) Segueing almost seamlessly from the last essay in Part III, the Sex theme finds itself embroiled in the wages of sex, more than directly engaging questions of the representation of pleasure or even the sex act itself. On the documentary agenda since the beginning, notions of sex, sexuality, and gender here find a point of ­fluidity and transformation that would have been hard to imagine just a few decades ago. Documentary both makes and records these changes. As with all of the other themes in this Companion, there were many ways to approach the theme of “Sex,” any and all of them equally valid. In this case, Laura Kang places a heavy emphasis on the consequences of violent conflations of nation, race, gender, and sexuality, through which the body is subjugated (in this grouping of essays, ­generally gendered female, though not necessarily biologically so) in order to be admitted into the sphere of the social, if not also the sexual. We consider it a strength of this volume that the essay that deals most explicitly with sex and the representation of sexuality (Ward’s “Capturing the Labors of Sex Work”) finds itself comfortably inhabiting a place in the previous section on Work, outlined above. Instead, under the rubric of Sex, we find three essays elaborating a range of representations from the mutilated to the transmorphic gendered body, and the class and race implications raised therein.

Part V Virus (edited by Bishnupriya Ghosh) From the macro themes of Planet, Migration, and Sex, we transition to the most micro of phenomena that nonetheless has had devastating transformative effects on all cultures in every part of the globe. As editor, Bishnupriya Ghosh claims, “The

6

Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

body – the target of biotech innovations and biomedical interventions – is the final frontier.” No one is immune from the incursions of the countless viruses, both new and old, circumnavigating this earth, nor from their medical, biopolitical, and representational effects. The tiny microorganism that we vaguely know as virus has actually found a most hospitable context in the confluence of topics that precede Virus in this anthology: planetary degradation, accelerated migration, and the increased opportunities of sexual encounter, all facilitated by contemporary global conditions. The biopolitical can find no better vehicle than the virus to expose its excesses and demands. How documentary has negotiated this invisible yet highly consequential phenomena is the subject of this section.

Part VI Religion (edited by Alisa Lebow and Alexandra Juhasz) God is not dead, it would seem, and religious forces of all persuasions have taken on renewed vigor and vehemence in “his” name, proving once and for all that the age of reason has come to an end. How has documentary, a product of rationalism, faced these re-emergent manifestations of belief, the spiritual, the ineffable? One can occasionally glimpse, as with films like Werner Herzog’s apocalyptic Lessons of Darkness (1992), or Alexander Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices (1993), the possibilities of representing the spiritual. But what we see more commonly is documentary’s attempt to grapple with religious precepts such as vengeance, forgiveness, retribution, or in the case of Tran Van Thuy’s work detailed in Dean Wilson’s essay here, kindness. Religion, as a pervasive phenomenon in nearly every culture known to humankind, finds its way implicitly if not explicitly into documentary, though it is rarely addressed forthrightly. The three essays in this section look at films that do take religion as a central subject. Considering the influence religion has had on our age, whether in terms of extremism, fundamentalism, or sectarianism, we are pleased to introduce these attempts to look at this theme head on.

Part VII War (edited by Jeffrey Skoller) If the start of the twenty-first century is any indication, it may well supersede the twentieth as the bloodiest century ever. How do we represent war, from whose viewpoint, and to what avail? Can documentary contribute to peace, or for that matter to war? War is inextricably bound up with cinema, the documentary image no less than its fictional counterpart. Recent documentaries, especially those about the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan of the 2000s, tend toward the subjective observational, often shot from the soldier’s eye view, emphasizing personal experience over political purpose by drawing the viewer into the “action” with little or no analysis. The essays in this section identify this trend while locating cinematic

Introduction7 practices that pose a challenge to its paramilitary effects. A re-evaluation of prior strategies adopted by documentarians of all stripes is taken up, and some new (and not so new) approaches identified. Jane Gaines reassesses film theory’s approach to realism by insisting that the category is indispensable when considering the war (and anti-war) documentary. Nora Alter takes us through a comprehensive tour of all of Harun Farocki’s work on representations of war, too little discussed in ­documentary studies thus far. Alisa Lebow identifies an antidote to the contemporary “paramilitarist” war documentary, claiming a new category in the typology of the war documentary that she calls the “unwar” film. By drawing attention to some radically destabilizing filmic strategies, the section seeks to offer alternatives to the steady beat of war that have been successfully aided and abetted by some of the more successful war documentaries of this age.

Part VIII Torture (edited by Alisa Lebow) Torture has always been with us in one form or another. It is crucial to review its historical manifestations in order to better understand its abuses today. Imaging torture is a particular challenge, for as much as it is portrayed in fiction films and television series (the US television series 24 being the most egregious apology for torture in our times), it often eludes documentary representation, either due to discretion or as a function of modern torture itself, namely its engineered invisibility to the eye, and its calculated elusiveness toward the lens. “White torture” techniques, developed by the CIA but practiced worldwide, emerged precisely in order to escape detection. So how then to represent it? Filmmaker and theorist Susana de Sousa Dias admirably attempts to detail the finer points of her filmic project of representing not torture itself but the residual affect that it leaves in its wake. Yet, since the emergence of the Abu Ghraib photographs, the problem has been less torture’s invisibility than how to deal with its glaring emergence into the public imaginary. Mainstream documentaries, mostly from the United States, have attempted to grapple with recent high-profile incidents of torture, yet they often reproduce the power dynamics they pretend to want to undo. Anjali Nath gives voice to these often overlooked contradictions, while Macarena Gómez-Barris explores more complex representations that uncomfortably confront the viewer with their own misperceptions or misplaced expectations. The perpetrator’s perspective is considered in several of the essays as itself a new turn for documentary. The documentary encounter with the very men who are responsible for crimes against humanity, as discussed by Deirdre Boyle, demands a Levinasian reckoning with the other that poses real challenges for the documentary spectator. The question of gender, with women also flagrantly flouting the Geneva Conventions or turning on comrades under torture, as explored by Gómez-Barris, further upends any easy assumptions we might have in relation to the complexity of the intermingled actions of perpetration, violence, power, and their representation.

8

Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

Part IX Surveillance (edited by Elizabeth Cowie) Documentary has long been accused of voyeurism and infringements of privacy, yet in this increasingly camera-occupied climate, “life caught unawares” as Dziga Vertov once enthused, has now potentially taken on more sinister, totalizing, and authoritarian tones, as Brian Winston duly notes in his contribution to this section. But it is equally true that documentary can and sometimes does counter the surveilling gaze by disturbing its seamless projection. What may seem to be an affinity with spying and surveillance can, in the hands of the critical documentarian, also pose a challenge to it. As Elizabeth Cowie suggests both in her introduction and in her extended essay on the topic, one must distinguish between watching and looking, between the Foucaultian connaissance and savoir, between gathering information for purposes of control and gathering information for purposes of communicating ideas. As Sharon Lin Tay observes, and Cowie agrees, biopolitical investments of disciplining societies that reduce the individual to the Deleuzian “dividual,” a set of data that can be identified and more easily controlled, is precisely what is at stake in our surveillance societies. Documentary has both participated in that project and spent its not inconsiderable cultural capital attempting to expose its effects. The resistance to surveillance has given rise to its corollary, “sousveillance,” and Patrik Sjöberg considers the issues that arise when documentaries contend with the desire to undermine, reconfigure, or reappropriate the camera’s surveillant gaze. With its unique structure founded in these nine themes, our volume captures the zeitgeist of the contemporary documentary field, itself a reflection of and upon the culture(s) from which it emerges and which it influences in turn. Certainly, a liability of this more dispersed organizational method is that some films, and filmmakers, not to mention certain important themes and trends, might be over- or under-attended to: an indication, perhaps, of their momentary prominence or maybe simply a matter of happenstance. However, by allowing scholars to cluster ideas and approaches in ways that themselves are illustrative of movements in the field, we have found emerging, without our explicit intention, five intriguing and perhaps unexpected trends, convergences, or challenges to contemporary documentary and its study, discussed below.

Body Sovereignty Documentary witnesses and records broad systematic incursions into the corporeal: through laws and other limits on migration, work, and sex, and horrific indignities and violations via torture, war, and surveillance. Referring specifically to the way in which bodies are contained via the image, Ursula Beimann reminds us in her essay that “Documentary records often serve the interests of the state – to identify, to recognize, to know, to control.” Her own “migratory documentary aesthetic” attempts to record and intervene in such excesses of visual control, rather than reinforcing the bureaucratic power inherent therein. Meanwhile, Rebecca Hodes, in her essay about

Introduction9 a long-running state-run South African television series that focuses upon HIV/ AIDS, writes about how by using “the power of the televisual medium, Siyayinqoba/ Beat It! exposed the harm of the government’s response to HIV.” Documenting, and sometimes empathizing or perhaps acting in solidarity with the body in pain is a frequent concern of these essays, given contemporary ­documentary’s interest in organized cruelty. In the Torture theme, Macarena Gómez-Barris writes about “complex portrayals of the racialized female body as the site of subjectivity in front of various projects of male domination that include empire, counter insurgency, and social control.” The suffering body, empowered by evidence of her pain, can speak back to abusive power. However, according to Anjali Nath, any desire to show physical hurt raises its own formal and ethical limits: “This visual economy of suffering, however, engenders the desire for ‘real’ images of pain, legible evidence of torture, and grievable subjects who are worthy of compassion.” This “transnational production of global feminist subjects” ­represented in the form of women in pain becomes the focus of Patricia White’s essay in Part IV on documentaries that focus on female genital mutilation. She asks: “how do these films, like the NGOs they sometimes are produced or commissioned by, make feminist claims and identities legible by casting women and girls as objects of compassion within models of human rights?” Across the anthology, our authors also theorize the unique power of the documentary not simply to know about, and circulate, the horrific experiences of others’ bodies but to allow us to know with or through the body (including our own, as spectators), through affect, empathy, and sensation: “conjuring the ‘feel’ of real images through dramatizations or by drawing on the emotional impact of prisonguard testimony, in order to render the undocumented into the fathomable” (Nath). The body at work, when represented as an aesthetic object, also inhibits such embodied knowledge, whereas labor represented as work, taking account of the human toil and toll, can precisely enable a productive affective cathexis, leading to a recognition of labor as a site of struggle (Panse). Theorizing past documentary as a cognitive mode, there are also documentaries that ground their powers of persuasion within different, bodily knowledge traditions and practices. For instance, Angelica Fenner explains how the absence of visual proof of Buddhist Tulkus, throughout the religion’s ancient history and continuing into documentary’s more contemporary urge to share this history, pushes documentarians to render “an evidence of feeling.” Meanwhile, feminist understandings of knowing the “other” are matched with documentary theories and practices, like those of Lourdes Portillo addressed in Rosa-Linda Fregoso’s essay or of the emotional persuasion used in some of the Israeli documentaries discussed by Raya Morag. Interestingly, failures of empathy, and their representational aftermath, can themselves become part of a film’s structure, as discussed in Eve Oishi’s analysis of the self-reflexive work of Wu Tsang for her contribution to the theme Sex. Throughout the anthology, this focus on the body in physical and psychic pain asserts itself across the various themes and to the noted exclusion of other bodily experiences that we might have expected, for example most tellingly, pleasure. In

10

Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

this way – by noting this telling omission – the anthology’s organizing structure, dispersing authorial authority across many players and planes, does seem to reveal cultural, political, or theoretical inclinations that in themselves seem worthy of further consideration.

The Encounter, or Ethics of Knowing (the Other) The relations between subject and maker – an ongoing concern of theoretically trained and politically motivated filmmakers – across place, race, class, and regimes of power – drives many of the films referenced and the conversations about them. Introducing the theme Migration, Anikó Imre finds in her commissioned essays “a sensual, affective and ethical experience of constant encounters with otherness that requires ongoing cultural translation.” For author and artist Mieke Bal, who writes about her own documentaries for this theme as well, the “relationship between filmmakers and the people whose stories are being represented is primary.” Across social issues, we find our authors considering a “subjective” (Biemann) or perhaps feminist (Fregoso) logic behind the “intersubjective endeavor” (Fenner) that is the o ­ rganizing principle of many documentaries. But Patricia White alerts us to the many ethical contradictions that are raised when “transnational feminist political theory has troubled the call to ‘subjectification,’ cautioning that voice and choice are i­ mperatives consistent with neoliberal strategies to manage human desires in a global capitalist framework.” A similar set of contradictions is raised in documentaries that explore human trafficking, as these films locate the “disjunctions, inequities and lived ­challenges of the new global order” (Torchin). Another contention, here raised by Brian Winston in the theme Surveillance, is precisely to call the filmmaker into a more ethical relation with her subject, something too frequently missing in popular documentary forms. Winston targets filmmaker Eric Steele, whose The Bridge (2007) seems to forfeit any obligation to the “subject” (object) of his camera’s gaze in the service, Winston argues, of spectacle. A very different relationship is engendered between filmmaker and subject in the hands of Želimir Žilnik (Mazierska) whose intimate identification with those before his lens leads to an almost paternalistic sense of obligation. For instance, when shooting the film Crni film (Black Film, 1971), Ewa Mazierska recounts how, after failing to find accommodation for his homeless protagonists, he invites them to stay in his one-bedroom apartment along with his unsuspecting young wife. Yet a third possibility is opened up in Deirdre Boyle’s discussion of Rithy Panh and Thet Sambath’s work, where a palpably complex relational tension, comprised simultaneously of sympathy and antipathy, arises in the encounter between victim and perpetrator of genocide. The possibility of engaging documentary towards expanded relationality need not be with the other. Alexandra Juhasz considers the uses of documentary within an activist community: to stay connected to people who have died of AIDS, to the contemporary practices of AIDS activists, and to scholars who are part of this

Introduction 11 long-term movement. Rebecca Hodes, too, in her essay in the Virus theme, explains how Beat It! functions to consolidate a dispersed and diverse national community. And coming from another angle entirely, Janet Walker considers how documentary allows us to see humans’ relations with the world, asking “What are the conceptual elective affinities or frictions among various cartographies of people and places; their geographical unconscious, if you will?” Meanwhile, several of our authors look to documentary’s capacity to relate humans to the smallest of scales, such as our own molecular interiority. Kirsten Ostherr considers the ways in which molecular animation has “captivated popular and scientific public imaginations … by simultaneously appealing to the indexical qualities of medical imaging and the enduring cinematic fantasy of visualizing the invisible through technologies of r­ epresentation.” Alternatively, the documentaries to which Imre Szeman refers seek to highlight the enormity of the problem of oil by emphasizing the scale of it. They do this, he claims, not only to “add to knowledge” generally speaking, but to “generate an affective response,” in other words, to develop an emotional connection, a relationship, with the problem. Yet, this anthology reminds us that every improvement in visualization practices and processes has its concommitant adverse implications. Many of our authors attest that new technologies allow the state to move ever closer to its subjects, in direct violation of the ethical practices discussed above, through expanded states of surveillance and mapping. Patrik Sjöberg explains: “As the surveillance landscape shifts and moves however, the model founded upon a dichotomy of the Watcher, on the one hand, and the person being watched, on the other, however diverse and dynamic, can no longer house the new actors, technologies and behaviors on the ground and within the field.” The essays in the Surveillance, Torture, and Planet sections are ­particularly focused on these abuses (Cowie, Winston, Tay, Walker, Nath). However, by making this logic the visible subject of their work, contemporary documentaries can also have a counter-function, to “unsettle the viewer and force an ethical ­confrontation with the politics of displaced blame, witnessing, and betrayal that is recreated by prisoner captivity” (Gómez-Barris).

Subverting Referentiality: Beyond Historicity By presenting historic situations beyond the historicity of the event, by seeking to integrate the set of movements and counter-movements which permeate the images (as well as the words), coalescing diverse temporalities into the same moment, we can subvert the principle of referentiality and the logic of the representation – in other words, we can go beyond the idea of cinema as an “open window on the world” (de Sousa Dias). As Jane Gaines asserts in her essay, documentary “uses the world to change the world.” One might reasonably assume that the documentaries under consideration in this anthology, which were largely chosen because they are explicitly committed to changing the world, would be committed to showing that world. Thus, it is

12

Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

surprising to see how many of the essays focus upon contemporary documentary practices that negotiate the, shall we say, less apparent, terrain of “representing the unrepresentable,” or seeing beyond the real or the referent. Eve Oishi writes about mobile and political understandings of “realness and realism within documentaries during their historical moments, particularly in terms of the way that queer sexuality, race, and gender function in relation to one another and in relation to documentary conventions.” Jane Gaines discusses what she calls “the two image wars”, the representation of war versus the war over its representation: one ­eminently seeable, the other much harder to discern. Our anthology is rife with such documentaries that can’t or won’t broker in visual evidence. Angelica Fenner notes how documenting Tulkus, who carry a trace of their former selves inside of themselves, forces us to ask a larger documentary question: “Is that which is ­captured on film the real thing? What are we really looking at, and how is its ­veridical status and actuality to be ascertained?” Our authors ask this question in various ways as they consider work that pushes documentary form to represent things that go largely unseen, such as the immaterial labor of global capitalism (Ward, Torchin) or the unseeable of its many workers’ work (Panse). Our authors attend to the visualization of memory (Juhasz) and the vain efforts to document that which intends to elude detection (de Sousa Dias, Sjöberg, Cowie, Tay), or ways in which particular filmic approaches work towards making the invisible visible (Alter, Lebow). By attending to the microscopic, Kirsten Ostherr considers how scientific imaging shows “the invisible real” through an “information indexicality” that is “a computed version of photographic indexicality.” The occlusion of vision is of significant interest to many of our authors who are thinking about representations of violence. Alisa Lebow discusses films that resist the urge to represent the spectacle of war, precisely by turning away from the action. She contends that the best way to undermine the all too seductive relationship between cinema and warfare is to look past its undeniably dramatic encounters to that which can be seen only with particular care and attention, as if ignoring the main attraction and looking at something small to its side. In the same section, Nora Alter similarly encourages us to find where the “unconscious of the visible, appears to be that which is seeable, but can occlude vision,” a process she finds developed in the documentaries about war by Harun Farocki. Seeing, in both of these essays, is in some sense over-determined, where looking for one thing means to miss another. The optics required for this type of visualization of the invisible could be said to be a kind of unconscious optics of the sort alluded to by Walter Benjamin. Meanwhile, many of our authors discuss documentary practices that are bent upon representing experience that has not been recorded, and that cannot be recorded in that it has been structured to leave no visible trace. These are the “military-carceral spaces” that Trevor Paglen has called “dark spots on the map” (Nath) or “the unrepresentable, unseen spaces of detention” that Ursula Biemann addresses in her documentary practice. Filmmaker Susana de Sousa Dias, too, finds “blanks, lacunae, and non-sayings,” as the material she must render sensible in her

Introduction 13 film 48. She asks: “in the absence of bodies of evidence, how can the dimension of the violence wrought by the state be revealed?” Meanwhile, Anjali Nath shows how both Road to Guantanamo (Michael Winterbottom, 2006) and Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007) rely on strategies of representation that exceed the promise of the “indexical” image. Given that a political imperative of documentary has long been the production of testimony against atrocity, Deirdre Boyle, also writing in the Torture section, considers how this trend of anti-indexical ­documentary raises a critical question: if documentary documents the unseen, what models of testimony does this raise? Of course, the violence that undergirds state relations is often hidden, so another function of documentary is to visualize regimes of power. Jane Gaines acknowledges that this strategy has been at the forefront of anti-war documentaries for decades, but may in this era be in need of reappraisal. As Raya Morag puts it in her essay on Jewish extremist documentaries in Israel, the process of “[c]reating an alternative to dominant politics and making ‘visible’ of what is hidden provides secular spectators with a format for self-exploration through which they can reassess their identity.” However, they may not always work to expose the operations of power effectively and the tools to do so may also be used for other less reflexive or radical purposes. Nonetheless, the effort is still underway, and it may be worth exploring films not often examined in the field, such as Chilean director Carmen Castillo’s haunting documentary, La Flaca Alejandra: Vidas y muertes de una mujer chilena (Skinny Alejandra: Lives and Deaths of a Chilean Woman, 1994), where a concerted effort to make the operations of state violence, in the form of coercing informants, is made absolutely and painfully apparent (Gómez-Barris). The somewhat more benevolent yet nonetheless repressive operations of state coercion are exposed in Dean Wilson’s investigation of the Vietnamese film, The Story of Kindness (Tran Van Thuy, 1985) which “represents a form of pragmatism under an edifice of socialist power.” There is of course the very visibility of surveillance and its offshoots that purport to see all, like some omniscient electronic panopticon, yet not surprisingly, this all-seeing has its limits too (Tay), and indeed does not ­necessarily translate into all-knowing (Cowie). The ways in which bodies, under surveillance or the relentlessly imaging eye of the documentary, can evade, elude, occlude, or obscure the camera’s lens are elaborated on by Patrik Sjöberg in his exploration of strategies of “surveillance resistance.” Thus, we suggest that many contemporary documentaries are engaged in the creative treatment of the unseeable: whether this is because what they document hasn’t happened yet, what Juan Salazar calls “a creative treatment of possibility” or because it is about some manner of invisible geography occurring on scales beyond our technological capacity to see (micro or macro: Ostherr, Walker, Salazar), or indeed because new technologies have divested from a necessary connection to indexicality altogether: “database art does not have as its primary concern the representation of reality” (Tay). These many “renderings of the invisible world” produce new forms, temporalities, and fields for representing “the real,” what Kirsten Ostherr considers a  “magnification and acceleration.” In fact, so many of our authors conceive of

14

Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

contemporary documentary as a “geographic practice” (Walker) that metaphors and practices of mapping demand attention as a contemporary documentary trend in their own right.

Mapping the Permeable Borders of Space and Time While several of our authors theorize the documentary as an exchange between people (Bal, Biemann, Juhasz, and Fregoso), many others think about the relations between subjects and place: “a signifying system in which the subject is thought of in connection with place and notions of belonging, borders, transgression, and movement. Geography here is a cultural practice, a symbolic way of redesigning space” (Biemann). Anikó Imre introduces her section on Migration by looking at movements (of bodies in space and the moving image) that evoke metaphors of flow – across nations, inside of bodies, between genres and disciplines – figuring contemporary documentary as invested in a “disruptive cartography [which] is further enhanced by an engagement with the genre-hybridity” (Torchin). Not ­surprisingly, given the concern with national borders within the current incarnation of State Zionism, limits, territorial disputes, and contestations as well as incursions into filmic forms previously unexploited by the Right, find their way into new right-wing Israeli documentaries as discussed by Raya Morag. Thus, border crossings, both actual and metaphoric, could easily be considered another overarching theme of the book. Many of our authors look to documentary engagements at the macro or micro level: geographic, planetary, migration, surveillance, mapping, virus. Flow becomes a verb of choice to describe large (and small) movements of information, people, microbes, and capital: “the ways in which deregulation, free trade agreements, and transnational capital construct and affect the border” (Biemann). Leshu Torchin concurs: “Films about trafficking become means of visualizing these unseen currents, and more importantly, of introducing the human element into the flows of capital, labor, and technology.” Imre Szeman, in discussing the politics of oil, uses the metaphor as well when he says, “oil is only a problem because of the larger systems through which it flows.” The map also becomes a ­metaphor in its own right, one that explains other kinds of experiences. Janet Walker discusses GPS-enhanced visualizations as enabling a “regime that is explicitly ­cartographic.” And Sharon Lin Tay discusses how mapping and tracking in network culture generates something other than control. The “concept of cartography,” when adapted into digital art forms, “often avails itself as a metaphor to characterize the ways in which digital objects function. Adopting cartography as a conceit assumes a particular notion of immanence for the processes and constraints of a technological object” (Tay). Interestingly, in the two pieces in the anthology about (former) communist countries (Vietnam and Yugoslavia, covered by Wilson and Mazierska, respectively) attempts by the state to resist or control entry into the flow of capital are found to be constitutive. Meanwhile, Raya Morag reminds us that there are political, as well as economic, motivations for state regimes to want to control, not release into

Introduction 15 flow: “In the socio-political-ethnic-religious conditions of the second Intifada, crossing ethnic, religious, or gendered borders becomes a staged act, a fraud that leads to the next explosion.” Of course, any changes in conceptions of space render alterations in time. Flow can also attest to types of historical iterations, to a temporal shift and its filmic traces in memorializing something as significant and representationally varied as the history of HIV/AIDS and the liabilities of ready, unobstructed access to images of the dead (Juhasz). New forms of visualization deliver a sense of access to history and the future as more porous. “I think documentary cinemas can play a role in instantiating the future by rendering it present and giving it a concrete form, thus permitting viewers to engage with anticipatory modes of futuring of the planet” (Salazar). Angelica Fenner notes how Buddhist documentaries, once unmoored from indexical accountability, also then take on an “uncanny relation to time.” Susana De Sousa Dias describes something similar in her own documentary practice that attempts to ­represent beyond temporality: “An ‘inside’ presupposes depth but this does not ­necessarily consist of visual planes. In 48 the penetration in shots takes place through duration, that is, montage in temporal depth. This is created by stretching the time in images – which perforce involves a kind of paradox: how does one stretch time in a photograph?”

New Cognitive Tools and Their New Political Aesthetics Finally, some of our authors posit that new technologies can render new ways of seeing and knowing, a techno-deterministic point of view that just as many in the anthology might challenge. Digital technologies “produce images – and sounds – that challenge assumptions of the spaces of visibility as being knowable, as ­inherently knowledge – connaissance” (Cowie). Ursula Biemann explains how she uses her “video camera as a cognitive tool.” And Rebecca Hodes’s intervenes in the logics of scientific epistemology by insisting on its ways of knowing as inevitably politicized. Kirsten Ostherr describes how rendering scientific knowledge through image production allows for a “conceptual, rather than perceptual ‘real,’” while Dean Wilson explains how the work of Tran Van Thuy is a “different way to know ­communism.” This politicized knowing has its resonances in Farocki’s work as brought to light by Nora Alter: that which is a priori, always already implies an unknowing and an unseeing, and it is left to the artist/filmmaker to find strategies to bring other ways of seeing and thus knowing into the realm of the visible. This Rancierian insight, prefigured by Gramsci and others, is echoed in Alisa Lebow’s observations of the “unwar film,” where the task of the conscientious filmmaker is precisely to trouble the commonsense ways of knowing and perceiving war (as inevitable) and thus interrupting its relentless march. Again this approach finds other expressions, such as in the work discussed by Macarena Gómez-Barris, that unsettles the viewer and forces an ethical confrontation with the politics of ­displaced blame, witnessing, and betrayal that is recreated by prisoner captivity.

16

Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

New tools, new (and old) possibilities for political action. Ursula Biemann believes hers is a “political aesthetic” where, not unlike Alisa Lebow’s ethical “unwar” ­filmmakers, her “task is to intervene effectively in current flows of representation, their narratives and framing devices.” As we suggested earlier, the new forms, ­practices, and theories of documentaries raised by this anthology are produced with an overt commitment to political change that is matched with alterations and reconfigurations in form. It may also be matched by alterations in theoretical paradigms for thinking about documentary. As Jane Gaines insists, “however enthusiastically we once got on the bandwagon of ‘the crisis of the index’ we should probably now get off,” since the “real historical conditions” depicted in most documentaries have not been “dreamed up.” In fact, for many of our authors, a world overrun by visualization and documentary technologies leads to the need for new kinds of “resistance.” Patrik Sjöberg writes: “resistance should in this context be understood in an inclusive and suggestive manner with regards to what passes for a surveillance situation. I am looking at the interrelated behavioral pattern between someone who deliberately wants to avoid being identified and those who are equally deliberate in installing identification technologies.” But others see documentary films continuing long-held projects of individual and community empowerment: “These films perform an important pedagogical and political function, encouraging the creation of activist identities … for both [subjects] and viewers” (Ward). Beyond constructing activist identities, some documentary theorists and practitioners still put stock in truth. “Without truth, there can be no reconciliation. And documentaries are one means of revealing the truth even when it lies hidden within dubious truth claims asserted by unreliable ­subjects” (Boyle). Other authors in this collection believe the field of documentary can still contribute to a public sphere. Patricia White writes: “The cultural field of documentary  – encompassing feminist media organizations like Women Make Movies, funders, broadcasters, and educators, as well as scholars, makers, and audiences – constitutes a public sphere in which activist and theoretical debate, contested reception, and continually renewed cultural production articulate the productively shifting terms of transnational feminism.” Rebecca Hodes, too, understands Beat It! as a powerful form of education and activism: “people living with HIV have used the visual medium of documentary to represent themselves and to foster new political identities and affiliations in post-apartheid South Africa.” There is a way in which many films discussed in this volume can be described as engaging in “political ­pedagogy,” as Imre Szeman suggests, yet often without being overtly political or ­pedagogic. Documentary, even in this post-analogue, beyond the document, era, still seeks to address itself to issues relevant to life on this planet, utilizing techniques that evoke what Jane Gaines usefully refers to as a “same world sensation.” And the role of the documentary film scholar, who may in some cases also be a documentary filmmaker, has an important – and potentially forward looking – role in this process as well. Juan Salazar, whose theme Planet will begin this anthology on a cautionary and even catastrophic register, helps us conclude this Introduction with a description of the documentary critic’s potential for some possibility of political agency:

Introduction 17 “by speculating about documentary film’s potential for rendering an anticipatory futuring of socio-ecological change, documentary cinema [can be seen as] a resource of hope.”

Note 1 See, e.g., Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong, eds., Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008); Jane Chapman, Issues in Contemporary Documentary (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009); Vinicius Navarro and Louise Spence, eds., Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers ­University Press, 2011); Brian Winston, ed., The Documentary Film Book (London: BFI/ Palgrave, 2013).

Reference Heise, U.K. (2008) Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part I

Planet

Introduction Planet

Juan Francisco Salazar

Earth Day took place for the first time on April 22, 1970. It came to materialize an emerging planetary consciousness, fueled by the vitality of anti-war and civil rights movements, where environmental concerns took center stage for the first time. Since then, the date has become a symbol and a worldwide celebration of global environmentalisms. Some of the first images to illustrate this new awareness of a global environment, which later became exhausted by overuse by the environmentalist movement in the global north during the 1970s and 1980s, were the famous images taken by the Apollo missions. First, the 1968 image of the Earth rising on the Moon’s horizon taken by the Apollo 8, but most notoriously, the famous image of the “blue marble” taken by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972. In 1988 the same image was used on the cover of Time magazine to illustrate that year’s Man of the Year (now Person of the Year): “The Endangered Planet Earth.” Environment and global are in fact two notions that have developed forcefully in tandem since the appearance of environmental studies in the 1940s and the development to planetary sciences stemming out of the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year. In 1969, reflecting on the initial Apollo images and the first humans to walk on the Moon, Allen Ginsberg (1972) wrote: “No Science Fiction expected this GlobeEye Consciousness.” In fact, these images opened up for the first time a path for a new kind of planetary imagination, a new form of planetary consciousness which took on a new dimension once the planet was able to be “seen” from afar; from outer space; a planetary disposition that computer imaging – also since the 1970s – has been able to powerfully convey through modeling and visualization of a global ecology. As environmental cultural studies scholar Ursula K. Heise points out, these images provide “an apt metaphor for a cultural moment in which an entire planet A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

22

Juan Francisco Salazar

becomes graspable as one’s local backyard” (Heise, 2008: 4). This new planetary global ecology emerging since the 1970s and fired up by new theories such as James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis quickly became “a new arena of political conflict” (Sachs, 1993) and has recently “become a core concern of social and cultural theory” (Heise, 2008: 4). Hence, when setting out to interpret the theme of Planet for this volume on contemporary documentary cinema, a starting point was to interrogate how do we make sense of the idea of planet at a time when globalism and globality have become the currency of choice in contemporary social and cultural theory. The etymology of the English word planet, as in many other Indo-European derived languages, originates in the Greek word planētēs, meaning “wanderer, drifter.” Astēr planētēs or wandering star thus was a word used to refer to celestial bodies that wander/drift through the heavens (as opposed to the “fixed stars” of the constellations). I am captivated by how this notion of wandering captures humanity’s present moment: a permanent state of movement, of itinerant circumstances, of nomadic and transient acts, of a politics of drifting, of a civilizational wanderlust. Like never before, as DyerWitheford so eloquently puts it, today the whole planet has been opened up “as a field for manoeuvre” (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 133). In putting together this section I was interested in conveying a critical perspective on planetarity through a series of commissioned essays that could reflect critically on what Ursula K. Heise (2008) calls a “sense of planet” and what Edgar Morin (1999) has called “Earth identity.” In other words, essays which could develop a critical sensibility on the frictions arising between an “awareness of the planetary whole and the sharpened perception of differences” (Heise, 2008), which mark the form in which the global is presented and represented in contemporary documentary film. As such, when the future of the human species is now situated on a planetary scale and is immanent to the future of the non-human world, we were most interested in bringing together a series of preoccupations around two main vectors to interpret the notion of planetarity in documentary film: the environment and the future. In doing so I have tried to put together a compelling case that documentary cinema is a vital and formidable cultural strategy and device through which to theorize not only how the planet has become perceivable and experienceable as a complex set of ecosystems, but most importantly how planetary futures are being played out, mobilized, and put into practice through differing knowledge practices. Here wandering also attaches its meaning to the notion of wondering. Wondering in this context concerns speculation and conjecture about our relationship with nature and our attachment to an array of possible futures. In relation to the power of cinema in general, not just documentary film, Sean Cubitt has persuasively articulated the view that certain types of cinemas have the capacity to produce films that are “more ethically, emotionally, and intellectually satisfying than much of what passes for ecopolitics” (Cubitt, 2005: 1). It may be fair to say that a planetary politics in documentary film is not necessarily a post-1990s phenomenon, fueled by new understandings of the scale of climate change, mass biological extinctions, irremediable loss of biodiversity and

Introduction 23 the new geopolitics of scarcity. A whole wave of advocacy documentary films, looking at nuclear hazard, the effects of radiation from nuclear power plants, and the imminence of nuclear war surged strongly in the 1970s and 1980s. These in some way also addressed a sense of planet and of planetary annihilation by nuclear war. But in this section the focus is rather on how in the past two decades or so there has been a rush of documentary films that convey a “sense of planet” through a “global-eye consciousness” preoccupied with the possibility of developing an ecocritical perspective in documentary film. One such film is Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home (2009), a $12 million feature-length environmental documentary that became the first film to premiere on YouTube at the same time as in cinemas and on TV. By mid 2012, the film had received more than 32 million views on YouTube. Home, like many other “contemplative” films of this kind, find their role in educating and contributing to “an awareness of our Earth-Homeland” (Morin, 1999). However, films like these do take a rather deterministic and hegemonic planet-wide perspective, in that they fail to signal and address the tensions, frictions, and destabilizing forces of locally embedded planetarity. Ursula K. Heise sees this as “a field of tension between the embrace of and the resistance to global connectedness, and between the commitment to a planetary vision and the utopian reinvestment in the local” (Heise, 2008: 21). This tension in contemporary environmental documentaries connects to broader attempts irrupting in recent years, and more or less coalescing in a wide array of related fields of knowledge and practice: eco-media, eco-cinema, environmental history, environmental humanities, environmental communication, and environmental cultural studies. In selecting the essays for this section, we wanted to invite authors whose work would highlight a planet-wide perspective but which could incorporate a strong critique of bottom-up eco-politics. In searching within a vast sea of possibilities – given the rise to prominence of environmental documentaries in recent times – we looked for essays that could connect to current works in eco-criticism and eco-film criticism and that could develop a critical cosmopolitan perspective without leaving the concern for local eco-politics behind. As Sean Cubitt puts it: “an environmentalism that ignores class, poverty, inequality pestilence, war and injustice is not a political platform anyone would care to follow” (Cubitt, 2013: 279). Broadly speaking, all three essays in this section ponder in one way or another on the environmental crises that are casting a profound anxiety about the future of human and non-human life on this planet. Each essay connects with contemporary critical eco-criticism in order to discuss not one form of planetarity and futurity but “a variety of ecological imaginations of the global” (Heise, 2008: 62). Whether focusing on the scalar aesthetics of oil, the datafication of sea level rise, or the assembling and putting into practice of divergent potential futures, the three essays in this section invite a deep reflection about the profound transformations in the complex dynamics of coupled socio-ecological systems at a planetary scale. As Kathryn Yusoff so clearly sets it: the catastrophe of climate change is excessive and will inscribe all earthly space. It is earth writing writ large (Yusoff, 2009; see also Walker,

24

Juan Francisco Salazar

this volume). These profound transformations, which have paved the way for us to conceive of an epoch, the anthropocene, where human intervention has geophysical force, speak of a moment in human history characterized by an agonizing wondering about the future of the planet, our own existence as human beings, and our relationship with “our environment” that is irreversibly changing at an unprecedented scale. The anthropocene lives with a tension that is amplified by the recognition that the planet may be more like “a moving whirlwind with no organizing centre” (Morin, 1999) than a global system. The essays in this section signal a sort of zeitgeist in the emerging and burgeoning field of eco-cinema studies, as they investigate the politics and poetics of documentary cinema’s interventions in contemporary renderings of global change as the “new spectre haunting the ‘globe’” (Szerszynski and Urry, 2010: 1). All three authors are concerned with what documentary cinema, in both theory and practice, has to offer by reflecting upon a consciousness of planetary crisis and the inevitable thought of a tipping point – or irreversible change – to human life on this planet. As the world as we know it is disappearing in front of our very own eyes, can documentary film become something more than commentary and critique; moving beyond textual representation and deconstruction to contribute to an ethos of hope by instigating action on global change? What other ways are possible to visualize and narrativize the scale of planetary change, incorporating the interdependence of the human and the non-human? This endeavor has already begun with innovative new work on the earthy ecomaterialities of media (see, e.g., Maxwell and Miller, 2012; Bozak, 2012). If perhaps not manifest, all essays in this section also propel a latent critique to representation, slipping through the fissures of documentary film studies an attempt to go beyond representation and interpretation of the visible and the indexical, and choosing to focus on the material acts and performances of social life. In the first essay, “Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil Documentaries,” Imre Szeman resumes his ongoing concern with the simultaneously withdrawn and manifest entanglements of cinema and energy through a rethinking of the history of capital beyond geopolitical terms and more in terms of the forms of energy available to it at any given historical moment. In this particular reprint of his essay, Szeman zooms into three contemporary documentary films that illustrate “the astonishing degree to which human beings have remade a space as big as a planet, and continue to do so in ever more visible ways.” Szeman’s primary goal is to interrogate how the social life of oil is narrated and in doing so he offers a critical analysis of “the range of ways in which these films frame oil as a problem for their audiences, and what resources they offer as possible solutions to this (historically unprecedented) social and ecological problem.” In this way, his concern with the “scalar aesthetics of oil” connects to Nadia Bozak’s (2012) call to pay more detailed and critical attention to  the “hydrocarbon imagination,” signaling that all cinemas are – inevitably – ­ecologically placed and embedded. In the third essay, “Moving to Higher Ground? Documentary Film and Other Geolocative Technologies for Projecting Sea Level Rise,” Janet Walker discusses

Introduction 25 the visualization and representation of climate change, particularly the representation of sea level rise in lowland and coastal communities. Walker suggests that documentary films cannot afford to remain sequestered in the humanities division of the academy but must seek interdisciplinary exchanges and audiences within policy-making venues. In line with a strong tradition of participatory communication for social change, Walker critiques those discourses about climate change that don’t include citizens’ views of owning their own processes of communication, negotiation, and legislation about environmental issues that affect them. She focuses her analysis on two films, both of which are exemplary of environmental documentary’s current wave of advocacy cinema on global warming mitigation. In doing so, Walker discusses the role that strategies of scientific visualization, especially of coastal areas, play in the enactment of documentary film and video as navigational technologies. She goes further and invites us to think about documentary film as a particular mode of audiovisualization and navigation within a wider repertoire including highly technical modes of scientific modeling such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and geowebbased software and applications for digital earth mapping. Her argument concerns the shift from image to data and ties in effectively with Sean Cubitt’s critique of the ongoing preoccupation in film studies with the realist image in light of novel opportunities opened up by data visualization, or datafication. While taking a planetary-wide perspective, Walker’s essay does not shy away from engaging in local eco-politics. On the contrary, her essay brings to the foreground concerns with how small Pacific Islands and coastal areas of the world are increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, sea level rise, and other extreme weather events. In doing so she pays attention to the diversity of global eco-imaginations involved in the deterioration of coastal conditions and how extreme weather events affect the human and the non-human world as the livelihoods of hundreds of local communities are at stake. Both Imre Szeman’s and Janet Walker’s essays deploy an eco-critical sensibility akin to an activist eco-philosophy in which documentary films can effectively be regarded as public pedagogic devices capable of inspiring a progressive eco-politics leading to action on environmental issues of planetary scale. This is also partly addressed in the second essay of the section, “Anticipatory Modes of Futuring Planetary Change in Documentary Film,” where I advocate for documentary film to be thought and practiced as more than a creative treatment of actuality, but also as a creative treatment of possibility (or potentiality). My concern is with interrogating whether documentary cinema’s main preoccupation with “representing the past” and “documenting the real” can be tested (or defied) by speculating about documentary film’s potential for rendering an anticipatory futuring of socio-ecological change. In both instances the aim is to propel documentary cinema as a resource of hope in light of current social and ecological predicaments and the propinquity of unprecedented planetary crises. In this essay I take a closer look at three very different documentary films, all of which experiment in form to test ways of developing an affective account of planetary futures in documentary film; futures

26

Juan Francisco Salazar

that are perpetually deferred in everyday life. In choosing these films, I moved beyond their evident dissimilarities to focus on how documentary films can attempt to blur that dividing fence between imagining futures and practicing futures. I was interested in querying how documentary cinemas provide an account of a postcapitalist imagination – or fail to do so. In one of the films discussed, for example, The Planet, the filmmakers present a series of apocalyptic imaginaries of potential social and economic disintegration and urge the audiences to put their trust in the hands of the science of climate change. These types of documentary narratives, while important for raising awareness and instigating action, more often than not do in fact risk reinforcing the status quo and transforming the end of days into just one big manageable crisis. As Eric Swyngedouw states, “while the ecological Armageddon points at a universal, potentially species-wide destruction, the economic catastrophe is a particular one related solely to the threatened reproduction of, basically, capitalist relations” (2013: 11). In conclusion, this section hopes to contribute to an emergent cross-genre field of eco-cinema studies, while at the same time calling for an expansion of the horizons of eco-film criticism beyond a humanities-centric and a media-centric perspective. There are more or less a dozen documentary films analyzed in detail in all three essays. All of these films, in one way or another, tackle the conflictive issue – as Szeman eloquently puts it in reference to oil documentaries – “of translating expert knowledges into lay language or by producing accounts of damage to the environment that can be narrated and made visible, moving audiences from the specific (a film or a specific case) to the general (a confrontation with the issues facing the globe as a whole).” As a species with recently acquired planetary identity we know that what we do next (or don’t do) has fateful consequences for life in this planet, and that like never before, we no longer have the option to opt out or step out of civilization to return to it at a later time.

References Bozak, N. (2012) The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Cubitt, S. (2005) EcoMedia. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Cubitt, S. (2013) Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere: Data Visualization and Ecocriticism. In Rust, S., Monani, S., and Cubitt, S. (eds.) Ecocinema Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge. Dyer-Witheford, N. (1999) Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Ginsberg, A. (1972) In a Moonlit Hermit’s Cabin. In The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965–1971. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Heise, U.K. (2008) Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maxwell, R. and Miller, T. (2012) Greening the Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morin, E. (1999) Les sept savoirs nécessaires à l’éducation du future. Paris: UNESCO. Sachs, W. (ed.) (1993) Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict. London: Zed Books.

Introduction 27 Swyngedouw, E. (2013) Apocalypse Now! Fear and Doomsday Pleasures. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 24(1), 9–18. Szerszynski, B. and Urry, J. (2010) Changing Climates: Introduction. Theory, Culture & Society, 27(2–3), 1–8. Yusoff, K. (2009) Excess, Catastrophe, and Climate Change. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27(6), 1010–1029.

1

Crude Aesthetics

The Politics of Oil Documentaries Imre Szeman

How does the problem of oil appear in documentary film? In what follows, I examine the manner in which oil is represented in three “feature” documentaries released over the past five years: Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack’s A Crude Awakening (2006), Joe Berlinger’s Crude: The Real Price of Oil (2009), and Shannon Walsh’s H2Oil (2009).1 As might be expected, while each has oil at its core, these documentaries differ substantially both in subject matter and form. Berlinger’s Crude deals with a protracted legal case against the activities of Chevron in Ecuador; Walsh’s film examines the ecological and social impact of the Alberta oil sands, specifically its effects on the communities that rely on the water used in conjunction with bitumen processing; and Gelpke and McCormack offer an overview of the politics and economics of oil, together with the environmental damage it causes and the potential crisis of the end of oil. By examining them together, I want to consider the range of ways in which these documentaries frame oil as a problem for their audiences, and what resources they offer as possible solutions to this (historically unprecedented) social and ecological problem. These documentaries both reflect and are a source of the social narratives through which we describe oil to ourselves; it is revealing to see both the limits and possibilities of the narratives they proffer, which are pieced together out of the fragments of concepts and discourses dating back to the Enlightenment concerning nature, the social, and human collectivity. As is the case with documentaries on a wide range of social issues, these films about oil understand themselves as important forms of political pedagogy that not only shape audience understanding of the issues in question, but also hope to generate political and ecological responses that otherwise would not occur. This production of an outcome or change in societal imperatives is a long-standing desire of A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2014 Regents of the University of Minnesota. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



Crude Aesthetics

29

the kind of politically and ethically committed documentary filmmaking that for publics has to a large degree become identified with the function of documentary as such – even if there may be relatively scant evidence of the hoped-for translation of audience awareness of film themes into political action outside the theater (Gaines, 1999). While it nonetheless remains productive to critically assess the political efficacy of such documentaries – whether by considering the formal or stylistic approaches each makes to its subject matter (Monani, 2008), by examining their capacity to effectively expose “the gap between self-professed norms and behavior” (McLagan, 2006: 192), or by probing the generic politics of such “commodity biographies” (Wenzel, 2011) – my aim here will be to consider what these documentaries tell us about the social life of oil today. In what follows, I will treat these films as providing examples of narrative and aesthetic choices through which the problem of oil is framed – or can be framed – not only within the films but within the social more generally. The site of politics I will focus on is not the success or failure of any given documentary to constrain or mobilize a political response, but rather what the discursive, narrative, and aesthetic strategies employed suggest about the dominant ways in which the problem of oil is named and solutions to it proposed. Fredric Jameson famously describes cultural texts or artifacts as “symbolic acts” in which “real social contradictions, insurmountable in their own terms, find a purely formal resolution in the aesthetic realm” (Jameson, 1982: 64). It is in this sense that I will offer readings of these three documentaries as aesthetic acts that, in their own specific manner, have “the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions” (Jameson, 1982: 64) – unresolvable in perhaps a stronger and more determinate way than the social contradictions to which Jameson referred. My essay proceeds in three parts. First, by offering readings of these documentaries, I draw out the ways in which each narrates the social life of oil. In her recent discussion of human rights films, Meg McLagan (2006) argues that these films are developed around the axiom that to expose hidden forces and problems to the light of film is to generate the capacity in publics to address the situations the films uncover. One of the reasons for focusing on these three films in particular is that while they, too, might have this axiom at their core, they proceed with the awareness that the importance of oil to social life is already well known, that publics have yet to adequately respond to its demands and looming crises, and indeed, that they may be entirely unable to respond even if they adequately understand the issues. As my analysis of these three films will show, the “solutions” these films offer to the social contradictions generated by oil are made difficult by the fact that the place of this resource in our lives seems to defer the politics one hopes to generate from the production of a documentary about it – and not just the politics directly connected to documentary practice, but to broader ideas that persist about the relationship between belief and action in the operations of social life more generally. In the second part, I draw out some key discursive and conceptual claims made within these documentaries about the unprecedented social problem of oil. Finally, I conclude with an exploration of exactly what kind of “unresolvable social contradiction” oil might

30

Imre Szeman

be. Michael Hardt (2010) productively explores the antinomies that define and separate the anti-capitalist and environmental movements. The insights offered by these films suggest that the problem of oil has the potential to destabilize the aims of both movements. As surprising as it may sound, it is the socially taken-for-granted physical substance of oil – and, of course, the practices that it supports and enables – that has to be placed conceptually and discursively at the heart of both movements if either is to realize its ambitions.

Oil on Film: A Crude Awakening, Crude, and H2Oil There are an increasing number of documentary films that address the role, function, and impact of oil in the world today. The three films that I will discuss here attempt to map the social ontology of oil – the how, why, and wherefore of oil in our social, cultural, and political life. A Crude Awakening identifies the degree to which ­contemporary global society is dependent on a natural resource necessarily in short supply. Crude and H2Oil each examine the environmental consequences of oil exploration, with a focus on its effects on those indigenous communities who live in proximity to the resource and who thus have to endure both the ecological traumas of ongoing drilling and the sludge and slurry left at past drill sites. What distinguishes H2Oil from Crude is that the former includes brief lessons on peak oil as part of its overall narrative and makes this an element of its case against the Alberta oil sands; Crude’s focus, in contrast, is on the dynamics of law and corporate power as these play out in relation to a commodity at the heart of capitalism’s profit logic. In what follows, I probe the “lessons” each provides for thinking about oil by drawing out the (implicit or explicit) ways, both thematically and formally, in which they address the problems this substance generates.

A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash A Crude Awakening is divided into 10 sections (introduced by intertitles) that provide a narrative of the significance of oil for contemporary global society. It takes the form of a social documentary intended to identify and explain a contemporary problem hidden from view. The secret exposed here is the depth of dependence of contemporary social and economic systems on oil – a non-renewable resource whose era of abundance and easy access is now past, even if this fact seems little acknowledged by the manner in which it continues to be used and exploited. The film conveys the gravity of our historical moment with respect to oil through three techniques. First, it showcases testimonials about oil from a large number of experts. The range of expertise on which the filmmakers draw is impressive, as is the attention to the politics of each of these talking heads. Two of the most prominent speakers are Matthew Simmons, an energy investment banker, author, and adviser to President George W. Bush, and Roscoe Bartlett, a Republican US congressman



Crude Aesthetics

31

from Maryland. The film is careful to include voices from the oil industry, as well as from academics and scientists who deal with the issues the film raises from the vantage point of their own specialties. Notable for their absence – with the sole exception of attorney Matthew David Savinar, who until recently ran a website on the politics of peak oil – are those activists or environmentalists (or even Democrats!) whom one might expect to find in a film awakening us to the challenges of peak oil. A second technique is the communication of information about oil through the use of facts and statistics. These come directly from the mouths of the experts themselves, and they are invariably alarming (e.g., each calorie one eats requires 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce; by 2030 the planet will have to bring 200 million new barrels of oil on stream per day in order to deal with the depletion of existing wells as well as growth in demand; and so on). Finally, the context of peak oil is framed through the formal decisions made with respect to the images and sounds that fill up the space between the talking heads. There are numerous points one could make with respect to the particular use of montage and fast-cutting in many of the sequences in the film. The speed of much of the visual evidence, especially against the backdrop of Philip Glass’s minimalist soundtrack, suggests “a life out of balance,” as do the many images meant to evoke oil culture: sheiks walking through fancy shopping malls, sludge-filled rivers and oceans, battlefields on which wars have been fought over oil, and the mess of drill sites all over the world. At times, A Crude Awakening interlaces these images with older footage of car ads, instructional videos, and clips from celebratory corporate documentaries, all of which appear in hindsight as not just shortsighted but as obscene testaments to humanity’s waste and (in the case of the clips from the instructional videos) the very different relationship of supposedly objective knowledge systems (i.e., science and documentary film) to oil in the not too distant past. The 10 sections of the film build an effective case against oil. They link oil to geopolitical conflict (section 4: “A Magnet for War”), identify its centrality to daily social life (section  2: “We Use It for Everything!”), and explore the reasons for ­concern about the end of oil (section 6: “Peaking Out”). What the film does not do is offer a solution or resolution to the coming oil crash. The third section of the film looks at three spaces of oil production that have experienced the traumatic passage from oil boom to bust (McCamey, Texas; Maracaibo, Venezuela; and Baku, Azerbaijan). These are micro case studies intended to provide examples of what might soon happen on a macro scale. What we see are images of formerly f­ lourishing towns and cities, now partly abandoned and ugly. The images of Baku’s oilfields, which have been captured iconically in the photographs of Edward Burtynsky (2011), are especially haunting: the screen is filled with the remnants of old wooden derricks running up and spilling into the Caspian Sea, fresh oil still staining the ground. If these cases are meant as object lessons, one might expect them to be followed by information as to how it might be possible to manage the down cycle of oil that will soon be experienced on a planetary scale. A Crude Awakening, however, seems intent on informing its viewers that there is no way of offsetting a planetary crisis. The penultimate section of the film (section 9: “Technology to the Rescue?”)

32

Imre Szeman

presents possible options – electricity, hydrogen, biomass, nuclear, wind, and so on – only to have technology experts rule each of them out on the basis of inefficiency (at present it takes 3–6 gallons of gas(oline) to create enough hydrogen to enable us to drive the same distance as 1 gallon of gas), scale (10,000 nuclear plants would be needed to replace oil), or lack of resources (with that many nuclear plants in existence, uranium reserves would be exhausted in one to two decades). The film lays open the consequences of a civilization based on oil in order to present audiences with some insight into the why and how of the conflicts and pressures of the near future – a future about which there is little of substance that can be done because of the weight of existing infrastructure and the realpolitik of power in contemporary political and economic systems. There appears to be a deliberate decision in A Crude Awakening to avoid directly linking the narrative of peak oil to the impact of petrochemicals on the environment. The question of whether or not continued oil use – at either current or higher levels – will damage the environment is suspended, one suspects, in order to focus on the necessity of oil to current ways of living and being, and to preclude challenges to the film that might emerge from the growing contingent of climate skeptics. By contrast, H2Oil and Crude each explores specific examples of the impact of oil exploration and production on the environment and human communities. What we learn from these cases are not only the manner in which oil damages both ecological and human health, but also the degree to which the interests of elected governments, national legal systems, and multinational corporations are intertwined in ways that make difficult the possibility of addressing some of the specific (as opposed to systemic) impacts of oil.

Crude Crude examines a landmark legal case against the consequences of the oil exploration and extraction conducted by Texaco (purchased by Chevron in 2001) in Ecuador from 1964 to 1993. There are two main anchoring narratives in the film. The first follows the actions of Ecuadorean lawyer Pablo Fajardo and his American counterpart, Steven Donziger, over a two-year period (2006–2007) as they pursue a suit against Chevron on behalf of thousands of members of the Cofán indigenous community. The second is a single moment in the trial in which plaintiffs, defendants, and the presiding judge visit the Lago Agrio oilfield as part of the evidentiary process. In the first narrative, we witness the political and cultural struggles in which Fajardo and Donziger engage in an effort to generate awareness and legitimacy for their case. In addition to fights within the Ecuadorean legal system, these include actions at Chevron shareholders’ meetings, talks with the New York legal firm that is funding the suit, and engagement with the new left-wing government of Rafael Correa. In January 2007, the public relations battle they conduct in conjunction with the legal proceedings is accelerated as a result of the commission of a Vanity Fair article on Fajardo’s fight against Chevron on behalf of the Cofán, which leads to the



Crude Aesthetics

33

involvement of pop singer Sting and his wife, Trudi Styler, and results in Fajardo being given a CNN Hero’s Award in 2007. Even though the plaintiffs build legitimacy and support for their case in the media, legal maneuvering by Chevron means that a case that had at the time of the film’s release (2009) already been in process for 14 years would continue for another 10: the documents collected in the trial’s evidence room are so numerous that it is difficult to imagine any judge being able to work through them in a meaningful way even in the decade estimated by the film at its conclusion. The perspective of the film is clear: Chevron is at fault and is using its immense power as a multinational corporation ($204 billion in revenue in 2010) to make a conclusion to the trial impossible. The dirty soil and water, and the numerous health problems of the Cofán (infant deaths, cancers, skin lesions, and more), contrast starkly with the talking-head segments with Chevron scientists and lawyers, whose mobilization of scientific data attesting to the safety of their drill sites cannot but seem little more than corporate lies (indeed, the film points out that Ricardo Reis Veiga, the Chevron lawyer interviewed in the film, was indicted for fraud by the Ecuadorean government). Despite the fact that Donziger is shown to work the system in sometimes ethically questionable ways (he whispers to Trudi Styler to mention Chevron as frequently as possible in her comments on the situation of the Cofán, and the New York firm for which he works stands to make a fortune if the case is successful), his relentless indictment of Chevron’s corporate malfeasance mirrors the film’s own perspective on both the situation in Ecuador and in the world at large. However, the second guiding narrative of the film complicates this easy indictment of Chevron’s actions. In this section, Fajardo and Chevron’s attorney, Adolfo Callejas, move around the Lago Agrio oilfield, each making points as to what might constitute physical evidence for use in the trial (contaminated water, oil-soaked soil, etc.). While Callejas uses numerous tactics to shield Chevron from responsibility for the site, all return ultimately to the question of ownership. Callejas argues that while Fajardo and the plaintiffs make numerous claims, they provide no substantial evidence. Chevron disputes the claim that the water is contaminated by oil, or argues that such contamination as does exist introduces no health risk; they insist that it is impossible to link water contamination to oil that they own (as opposed to oil that might have seeped into river or groundwater from other drill sites or through natural means); and they make numerous legal points in relation to property rights. Property begets responsibility; and so Chevron argues that Petroecuador assumed responsibility for the site when they took it over, that the site was always a Texaco-Petroecuador consortium (such that the latter shares whatever responsibility is assumed for the former), that Texaco no longer exists as a company and so cannot be held responsible, and that the area in which the Cofán live was designated as an oil exploration site by the government in the 1960s, and so no people should be living there to begin with. Taken together, these points (and there are others in a similar vein) offer a confusing defense. Rather than building a coherent case, it is as if they are being thrown out in the hope that one or another will stick. After all, if there is no pollution, then

34

Imre Szeman

does it matter who owns the oil? If it were truly the case that Petroecuador has had responsibility for the site since 1992, why would Chevron be anxious about the level of pollutants in the area? And doesn’t the government bear ultimate responsibility for the Cofán if it has allowed this indigenous group to live in an area not intended for people? So why mount a defense about “safe” levels of oil in water or who owns what, when? From the perspective of the film, such confusing and overlapping arguments constitute further evidence against Chevron. But from another perspective, the claims made by Callejas and other Chevron employees draw attention to the meta-narrative of the film, which is less about oil than about the constitutive, systemic gap between, on the one hand, social responsibility, equality, and justice, and, on the other, the legal and political mechanisms that are in place to address the very real crisis faced by a community that now lives on in the barely concealed sludge of former drill sites.

H2Oil As its title indicates, H2Oil is also about what happens when oil finds its way into water as a result of industrial oil extraction. In the main, this film looks at the effects of the Alberta oil sands on the First Nations (Athabasca Dene) community in Fort Chipewyan, a hamlet situated on Lake Athabasca near the terminus of the Athabasca River. The Athabasca runs through the primary site of bitumen extraction and constitutes an important element of the process by which oil is recovered from the nearsolid “tar” that makes up the oil sands. Based on the recorded levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and arsenic in the water of both the river and the lake, the Dene and environmental scientists argue that the Athabasca River is absorbing the chemicals left behind by the extraction process, whether through deliberate action or errors and accidents in the retention of tailings. The main body of the film moves back and forth between claims and counterclaims about the level of toxins in the Athabasca by the Dene and the Alberta government, and in so doing explores the larger dynamics of corporate and political power in the province as it follows attempts by members of the Fort Chipewyan community to draw attention to the serious environmental and health problems they face. While it is committed to the exploration of the problems of Fort Chipewyan, H2Oil makes use of this case to outline the larger political, economic, and ecological entanglements generated by the oil sands. Well-known critics and commentators on Canada’s oil policy (and its connection with climate change), such as Tony Clarke,  Dr.  David Schindler, and Dr. Gordon Laxer, are given an opportunity to weigh in on the implications of current government decisions (or lack thereof) on  greenhouse gas emissions, water and soil contamination, and national resource independence. There are also short cartoon segments included that provide quick instructional overviews of the mechanics of oil sands, the implication of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America for Canadian water and oil, and on the places to which the end product of the oil sands are pumped (all of



Crude Aesthetics

35

the oil is currently exported to the United States). If Crude emphasized the role of corporations in the narrative of oil and water, the antagonists in H2Oil are in the main government agencies and ministries, whose representatives argue that they are behaving in a responsible and efficacious manner to address health and ecological concerns. The Ministry of the Environment disputes every one of the facts and figures on cancer rates, oil seepage, and carcinogen levels in the water proffered by scientists critical of their practices. A secondary narrative concerning the problems generated by a drill site for a spring-water company based in Hinton, Alberta, amplifies this criticism of government, highlighting how difficult it is even for businesspeople outside the oil industry to bring attention to the overuse and contamination of groundwater as a result of oil exploration and extraction. Notable for its absence in H2Oil is the oil industry itself. With few exceptions, its presence is signaled only by the frequent images inserted into (what have become) a form of generic montage about the oil sands: enormous, glowing refineries, made up of systems of pipes, exchangers, and condensers of almost unimaginable complexity; slow aerial pans of the vast extraction sites, framed against the edges of boreal forest now fast vanishing in their wake; and the slow-motion movement of grasshoppers (oil-pumping units) conjoined with (in a fashion similar to A Crude Awakening) sped-up images of consumer modernity – driving, building, shopping. The film is careful to highlight the close connection between industry and government in Alberta. The Office of the Environment is located in the Petroleum Tower in downtown Edmonton, and Assistant Deputy Minister of the Oil Sands Sustainable Development Secretariat, Heather Kennedy, is identified as a former employee of oil giant Suncor. Nevertheless, in contrast to the intimacy with which H2Oil engages with the Dene and others (e.g., Fort Chipewyan’s medical doctor, John O’Connor), oil corporations are filmed at a distance, figured as inhuman Goliaths in comparison to the all too human Davids living in Northern Alberta who are dependent on water that makes them sick. Taken together, these three films and the critical discourses that they mobilize – multiple in each case, and neither dogmatic nor simplistic – provide insight into how the problem of oil is framed and negotiated, both within documentary but also beyond it. These investigations of oil on film generate three insights into the discourses and narratives of the politics and problems of oil. In an earlier essay (Szeman, 2007) I argued that there are three broad social narratives through which the futures of oil (and so approaches to its present) have been articulated: strategic realism, techno-utopianism, and eco-apocalypse. These three documentaries interest me in particular because they do not fall easily into any of these categories; nor are they examples of the kinds of formally inventive, reflexive documentaries on the problem of oil to which I have devoted attention elsewhere (Szeman, 2010). While they share some of the conclusions of these latter documentaries, their commitment to a more expository or observational documentary form places them to one side of my earlier taxonomic scheme – neither abandoned to the realpolitik of struggles over diminishing resources, nor advocating a miraculous technological solution, nor accepting the disastrous fate of the end of oil even while critiquing the manner and

36

Imre Szeman

extent to which we late moderns use it. Even while they are cautious not to promote “solutions” to oil (even in the case of Crude and H2Oil, films for which redress for the affected indigenous communities might constitute at least a small step forward), they avoid the (sometimes too easy) discourse of eco-apocalypse. In all three films, conclusions are suspended in order to better map the nervous system of oil capitalism.

System Failure, Antinomy, Scale What insights, then, emerge from these films about how we narrate and respond to the problem of oil?

System failure All three films make clear that our existing social systems are inoperative. Though it might seem obvious to say it, oil is only a problem because of the larger systems through which it flows. The injustices faced by the Dene and the Cofán cannot and will not be resolved through existing mechanisms of law, property, electoral politics, or knowledge (i.e., science). The struggles waged by both indigenous groups regarding the scientific establishment of levels of pollutants in their water highlight the malleability of knowledge when it bumps into the imperatives of government and business. Systems of property and ownership overwrite questions of corporate or ethical responsibility: one rejoinder by Chevron lawyer Callejas is that it is impossible to identify the oil in the Cofán rivers as belonging to Texaco because “it doesn’t have a trademark on it.” There is no suggestion in Crude that a different legal outcome might come about if the US government legislated oil companies differently: the jump of the case to Ecuador is an attempt to see if corporate laws might be stronger elsewhere, but the film is careful not to suggest that even in Correa’s government property laws might be jettisoned. In H2Oil, government hypocrisies are not linked to this or that party in power – such that an electoral shift would open up new possibilities – but to the operations of power around a commodity that will be excavated no matter what the health or environmental outcomes. A Crude Awakening is most directly about system failure: whether or not large social systems develop a greater awareness and more concerted direction about their energy futures, there is little sense that they can in fact meaningfully address the impacts of oil or manage to offset the looming civilizational crisis of oil ontologies. Existing systems have failed precisely by working all too well (see Cazdyn and Szeman, 2011: 134–152). On the evidence of this film, two axioms drive the social toward this “successful” system failure. The first is accumulation. Even at levels that have recently (May 2014) caused US drivers to pull back on filling up their tanks, oil remains cheaper than drinking water or a Starbucks latte (which A Crude Awakening estimates at $50/gallon).



Crude Aesthetics

37

It remains a primary commodity in global production and consumption systems that depend on an ever-increasing expansion of GDP as a measure of social wealth and of progress – the reason economic growth trumps action on the climate in Alberta (and almost everywhere else). A second axiom operates at the level of the subject. One might ask: Why do people work for Chevron? Or Petroecuador? Why do workers and technical experts flock to the spaces of oil production? It is unlikely that it is because there is a strong support for the imperatives and initiatives of oil extraction and the economies it supports, but rather the need for work and fiscal security in an era in which the first axiom no longer encounters the impediments and strategies of a good (i.e., Keynesian) state. Lianne Lefsrud and Renate Meyer (2012) have studied the mechanism by which scientists involved in the Alberta oilfields explain to themselves their involvement in a process that they understand to have a climate impact: the availability of work enables a denial of scientific evidence even by scientists themselves. There is a telling moment in H2Oil in which spokespersons for an oil sands company are sent to address the concerns of the Dene First Nations. Their response to the criticisms by the Dene: they are only doing their jobs and not intending to hurt anyone. Their refusal to drink the local water suggests that they, too, suspect that the companies they represent are in fact causing damage to the environment and its human inhabitants. But they work for them anyway.

Antinomy? The identification of a failure in the capacity of a broad range of social systems to address anything as serious as the crises generated by oil can lead only to one conclusion. If existing systems cannot address the problems these films bring up, everything has to change – new systems have to come into existence guided by new axioms. But how to move from here to there? There is an expected suggestion in each of these films that it is through education and the transmission of information to publics, which in turn will generate change through official and unofficial social and political networks, that politics “happens” – in other words, the gesture that politically committed documentaries tend to make toward the pedagogic effects of “seeing is believing.” The opening segments of A Crude Awakening address bluntly the limits of knowledge about peak oil (Congressman Bartlett: “Not one in fifty, not one in one hundred people in our country have an inkling of the potential problem we’re facing”); part of the intent of the film is to transform this small minority into a majority. The additions of the didactic segments to the narrative of H2Oil confirm director Shannon Walsh’s hopes for the film to play a role in “educating a public who hadn’t yet heard of the tar sands, and creating a context for further activism,” and the ominous subtitle of Crude speaks to a similar desire to explain the “real price of oil” (Ward, 2011). But even if the films never disavow this fundamental political aim, they recognize the complexity of the situations they encounter and represent, and they are cautious about the degree to which they are willing to figure their politics solely in relation to

38

Imre Szeman

this pedagogic mode of knowledge transfer. These films frame two antinomies, the constitutive gaps first between knowledge and action, and second between aesthetics and politics. While neither of these may be an antinomy in the strong sense of the term (they are not the same as the Kantian puzzle of the divide between natural causality and human free will, for instance) the suggestion of a blockage that seemingly no amount of conceptual thought or political activity looks likely to undo generates a genuine problem for knowledge and aesthetic practice. Antinomy here is meant to describe a stark social contradiction that emerges out of the messy activity of innumerable social systems. Generating an awareness of the structuring role of oil in civilizational processes, and so, too, its obscene primacy over both human needs and ecological ones, produces on its own no resolution, even as it indicts the poverty of the present. As a genre, political documentaries like these three films might be seen as the invention of an imaginary solution to a social contradiction – the “imaginary” being the phantasmic liberal public sphere it imagines into existence, that supposed space in which debate and discussion leads to a resolution that maximizes (say) individual freedoms within the demands of social necessity. These films gesture in this direction, but the substance they each address – oil – does not allow them to imagine that they do more than give evidence of the social contradiction produced by this sticky substance. The politico-aesthetic at work in these films gestures toward the possibility of audiences “doing something” because of the conditions in their world, while at the same time being unable to commit themselves fully to a belief that they can produce either an increase in knowledge or political action, less as the result of failure of political will than because of a recognition of the constitutive nature of the world they produce and represent on film. The productivity of antinomy is that it gestures to an overcoming that is present in the terms of the structuring division, one that requires only the right insight into the dynamic that produces the division to begin with. A crude, reductive (which is not to say unproductive) way in which to think about oil is to understand it as foundational to contemporary social form. The social contradiction is that the founding premise of society as such is draining away and cannot be replaced. Where exactly can one find synthesis in such a system, even if one were to undo the “enlightened false consciousness” (see Sloterdijk, 1987) that generates the gap between knowing and doing, evidence and action? As a result of the demands of its subject matter, social contradiction in these films remains on their surface, whether they try to generate an imaginary resolution to it or not.

The failed sublime, or, scalar aesthetics This final point emerges out of the previous one. A dominant aesthetic strategy in reference to oil is to emphasize scale. This is perhaps an obvious approach to a site like the Alberta oil sands, which are estimated to be the size of Florida and which include numerous surface mining sites and vast tailings ponds that permit a direct visualization of environmental destruction.2 But there are other ways to visualize



Crude Aesthetics

39

and narrativize the scale of oil, too, including images of old drill sites on which derricks are clustered as tightly as bees in a hive, or the flow of traffic along freeways and through cities all over the planet. These images of cities and traffic are prominent in H2Oil and A Crude Awakening, and identify the civilizational dependence on oil that will lead to crisis as its last dregs are used up; the former images of environmental impact, present in all three films, point to the astonishing degree to which human beings have remade a space as big as a planet, and continue to do so in ever more visible ways. The use of scale in these documentaries is intended to add to knowledge and to generate an affective response. Is this not an appeal to the Kantian sublime in both of its aspects, the mathematical and the dynamical? Again, as with antinomy, the correlates are inexact: the palette of cities, however many different images of spedup traffic we are shown, is not without limits, and the images of the oil sands are not  of Nature but of its antithesis: “nature” after its encounter with humanity. Nevertheless, the gesture these films make toward representing oil through the visualization of scale do seem to have as their endpoint the same gesture as Kant’s analysis of the sublime: to bring into cognition even that which seems to supersede and fall outside of it. We are placed in awe of scale not so that we give up in the face of the vast existing infrastructure that depends on oil, or that we concede to an everexpanding tear in the face of the Earth (one now said to be visible from space), but that it provoke a closure of that gap between knowing and acting described above. And yet this gap persists. Has the possibility of a politics through such scalar aesthetics collapsed? Throughout the history of film theory (starting with writers such as Jean Epstein and André Bazin), there is an insistence on the capacity of film to record what is otherwise inaccessible to vision, opening up reality to that quotidian experience that cannot help but miss reality’s full ontological presence and depth. One should not disavow the capacity of documentary to bear witness to reality in just this way, both at the level of form and content; the sublime of oil culture that these films visualize does not readily appear to everyday experience, which is one of the reasons the consequences of the end of oil are neither feared nor acted upon. One can see Kant’s sublime as a domesticating process that renders what might well be alien to thought amenable to existing schema. The fact that the sublime fails is then not an issue, since its capacity to control and contain filmic images of traumatic scale in fact drains the latter of its effects, which is the exact opposite of what one might want. At the same time, however, abandoning oil to mathematical incomprehension or the terror of destroyed nature on a vast scale, the way in which a scalar aesthetics might be thought to do its work, seems to abandon thought to the inaction of what Slavoj Žižek has termed “cynical reason”: awareness without action, even in the face of disaster, since we cannot possibly act on something that exceeds our comprehension. In the end, what is incomprehensible is not the scale of our action on the world, but that our social world has as its foundation a substance demanded by our quotidian infrastructures, an input whose time has come, and soon will be gone. It’s unclear what action one could take, even if one wanted to.

40

Imre Szeman

The Politics of Documentary in an Era of Scarcity Michael Hardt’s “Two Faces of Apocalypse: A Letter from Copenhagen” (2010) draws attention to the similarities in and differences of the politics of the anti-capitalist and environmental movements. Superficially, one might expect these two movements to be more similar than different, or even as occupying the exact same ground: a visual representation of this relationship would be less a Venn diagram in which there is a zone of overlapping concern (and so zones of exclusion, too), but of two perfectly congruent sets that appear to be distinct only because each group spends more time in one part of the field than the other, thus misrecognizing the extent of their shared interests. Reflecting on his experience at COP 15 (the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference), however, Hardt recognizes that there are significant differences that would have to be addressed before each movement can operate fully in conjunction with the other. Hardt identifies three antinomies that define and separate the anti-capitalist and environmental movements (about the points of intersection – an opposition to property relations and their joint challenge to traditional measures of economic value – I’ll say no more). The first and defining one has to do with “a tendency … for discussions in the one domain [environmental movements] to be dominated by calls for preservation and limits, while the other is characterized by celebrations of limitless creative potential” (Hardt, 2010: 271). A second has to do with the question of knowledge. While “projects of autonomy and self-governance, as well as most struggles against social hierarchies, act on the assumption that everyone has access to the knowledge necessary for political action,” Hardt writes, “the basic facts of climate change – for example, the increasing proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere and its effects – are highly scientific and abstract from our daily experiences. Projects of public pedagogy can help spread such scientific knowledge, but in contrast to the knowledge based in the experience of subordination, this is fundamentally an expert knowledge” (2010: 272–273). The final antinomy grows out of a different relationship of each to time. For anti-capitalist movements, radical change that would bring about the end of days is the opening to a new (and better) world. By contrast, for environmentalists, “the end of days is just the end,” as the radical change that is likely on the horizon is one of “final catastrophe” (2010: 273). The second antinomy is the one on which documentaries of the kind that I have been exploring here hope to do their work, either by translating expert knowledges into lay language or by producing accounts of damage to the environment that can be narrated and made visible, moving audiences from the specific (a film or a specific case) to the general (a confrontation with the issues facing the globe as a whole). When the subject matter is oil, it is impossible not to reflect on the terms of the first antinomy – that is, on limits, not only of Earth’s environment but also of one specific element of it whose use has resulted in an assault on the environment even as it has contributed to or amplified the (apparent) limitlessness of human productive and imaginative capacity. But it is the third antinomy that haunts documentaries on oil. The division Hardt points to in this third moment is, at least from one perspective, the least convincing.



Crude Aesthetics

41

Does the end of days always already signal the effective destruction of the Earth’s environment? Or can it not also speak to the possibility of a new world in which the antinomy between limitlessness and limit has been resolved? In other words, what kind of revolution today could imagine that it has passed the end of days if it has not conceptualized what it means to live within limits? As long as it is figured in terms of climate change, the apocalyptical imagination of environmental movements continues to operate with an understanding of final catastrophe as temporally distant. When one thinks of catastrophe as the end of oil, however, the time horizon is pulled much closer, even as its politics are more difficult to cognitively map. For where should we place oil within this opposition of limit and limitlessness, the environment and the common? Oil is limited, and its use pulls closer that larger limit of the Earth’s environment, of which it is simultaneously a part (limit) and an other (catastrophe) that the future would be better off without. And what of the common and its limitlessness? A radical change to the present may well be precipitated by the evaporation of a commodity on which the common depends more than it might want to believe. “Fossil fuels helped create both the possibility of modern democracy and its limits” (Mitchell, 2011: 1); given the problems of modern democracy, its evaporation alongside that of the energy inputs that helped fuel it might be welcome. But there is no guarantee that the new world on the other side of the end of oil will be one made in the image of revolutionary groups and their labors. The oil documentaries that I’ve explored here struggle with Hardt’s antinomies and the political antinomies of crude aesthetics that I describe above, leaving open the question of how to resolve them (or even if they can be resolved), and refusing to offer solutions that would do little more than affirm that which they would seek to deny. Does this constitute a form of political success or failure? Or, perhaps their politics lie in the evidence they provide of the limit of what can be said about a socially ubiquitous substance that remains hidden from view – even today, and even in the process of bringing it to light. This chapter was originally published as “Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil Documentaries,” in Oil Culture, edited by Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. © 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota.

Notes 1 Crude: The Real Price of Oil, dir. Joe Berlinger (DVD, Red Envelope Entertainment, 2009); A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, dir. Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack (DVD, Lava Productions AG, 2006); and H2Oil, dir. Shannon Walsh (DVD, Loaded Pictures, 2009). 2 One notable instance of the documentary use of scale is Peter Mettler’s Petropolis, which consists entirely of aerial shots emphasizing the size and scope of Northern Alberta oil extraction. Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands, dir. Peter Mettler (DVD, Greenpeace Canada, 2009).

42

Imre Szeman

References Burtynsky, E. (2011) Oil. London: Steidl. Cazdyn, E. and Szeman, I. (2011) After Globalization. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Gaines, J.M. (1999) Political Mimesis. In Gaines, J.M. and Renov, M. (eds.) Collecting Visible Evidence, pp. 84–102. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hardt, M. (2010) Two Faces of Apocalypse: A Letter from Copenhagen. Polygraph, 22, 265–274. Jameson, F. (1982) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lefsrud, L. and Meyer, R. (2012) Science or Science Fiction? Experts’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change. Organizational Studies, 33(11), 1477–1506. McLagan, M. (2006) Introduction: Making Human Rights Claims Public. American Anthropologist, 1081, 191–195. Mitchell, T. (2011) Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. New York: Verso. Monani, S. (2008) Energizing Environmental Activism? Environmental Justice in Extreme Oil: The Wilderness and Oil on Ice. Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 2(1), 119–127. Sloterdijk, P. (1987) Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Szeman, I. (2007) System Failure: Oil, Futurity and the Anticipation of Disaster. South Atlantic Quarterly, 106(4), 805–823. Szeman, I. (2010) The Cultural Politics of Oil: On Lessons of Darkness and Black Sea Files. Polygraph, 22, 3–15. Ward, C. (2011) The Future Is Inside Your Sock: How People, Through Documentaries, Can Make a Difference, http://blog.nfb.ca/2011/05/10/the-future-is-inside-your-sock-howpeople-through-documentaries-can-make-a-difference/, accessed July 18, 2014. Wenzel, J. (2011) Consumption for the Common Good? Commodity Biography Film in an Age of Postconsumerism. Public Culture, 23(3), 573–602.

2

Anticipatory Modes of Futuring Planetary Change in Documentary Film Juan Francisco Salazar

Introduction There isn’t much doubt left that we are living through a momentous turning point within global capitalism; a moment that is continually and increasingly sparking new levels of anxiety about the future. In words of Edgar Morin, “the waning years of the twentieth century have given us ample reason to recognize the irremediable uncertainty of human history” (Morin, 2001: 65). These uncertainties, so illustrative of the present time, denote a growing awareness, perhaps a collective presentiment, that by the mid twenty-first century the planet we will inhabit will be dramatically different to the one in which we live in today. Until a post-capitalist politics can be fully imagined and can begin to be practiced until new political subjects can emerge in a post-climate change world, the future will continue to present itself as affectively indeterminate. This essay is concerned with the immanence of the future in documentary film. I offer a tentative consideration on how the future is made present, and manifests itself – or materializes – in three selected documentary films produced in the first decade of the 2000s: The Planet directed by Michael Sternberg, Linus Torrell, and Johan Söderberg (Sweden, 2006); Into Eternity directed by Michael Madsen (Denmark, 2010); and the film trilogy Otolith I, II, and III (UK, 2003–2009) produced by the Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun).1 These films employ – albeit in differing ways – modes of embodying a sense of the future, particularly one at a planetary scale. They were chosen because in their critique of the present, and the past, they provide a “fertile speculative ground for what the future may become” (Williams, 2011: 196). A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

44

Juan Francisco Salazar

The aim of the essay is that a closer analysis of these films – and reference to other related films – may illuminate some of the political currencies enjoyed today by visions of utopia and dystopia, hope and catastrophe, which, while central to science fiction genres, might also be transpiring into documentary film narratives and practices. Hence, in discussing these films I put forward two preliminary propositions. First, I advocate that documentary cinema could be thought and practiced not just as a creative treatment of actuality, but also one of possibility (or potentiality). Second, and intimately related to the first, I ask whether documentary cinema’s main preoccupation with “representing the past” and “documenting the real” can be tested – or resisted – by speculating about documentary film’s potential to act as a modality for rendering an anticipatory futuring of socio-ecological change. In both instances the aim is to propel documentary cinemas as “resources of hope” (Williams, 1989) in light of current social and ecological predicaments and the propinquity of unprecedented humanitarian crises. The essay therefore hovers over several documentary films that construct hybrid modalities of documentary film that present fuzzy boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, and science fiction, and then moves on to a more thorough overview of anticipatory modes of futuring in documentary film through an examination of the three above-mentioned films. The essay is divided into three main sections: the first section provides an introduction into documentary cinema and speculative realism and proposes to look at the anticipatory modes of representation in non-fiction cinema. The second section presents the three films in detail, and the third section concludes the essay by discussing these films in terms of their account of anticipatory and performative modes of futuring planetary change.

Documentary Film, Speculative Realism, and the Shaping of Things to Come In an analysis of the 1988 World Expo in Brisbane, Australia, Tony Bennett (1991) mobilized the idea that world fairs act as a modernizing and disciplinary apparatus that allows visitors (and by extension the city’s inhabitants) to play the roles within the futures that have been arranged for them. For Bennett, World Expos project the future in the form of a task to be performed in the present; and as technologies of power that shape those things to come, they instantiate the future by rendering it present and giving it a concrete form, thus permitting visitors to engage in what he calls “an anticipatory futuring of the self ” (Bennett, 1991: 37). I take Bennett’s analysis as an ignition device to start a discussion of documentary cinema’s role in accounting for anticipatory futurings of social and ecological change. Visions of the future exist in an array of possibilities that range from naïve utopianism to extreme dystopianism, and from radical politics to the apolitical. However, documentary cinema has seldom worked in future modes to account for impending crises. The three films discussed in more detail in the following section do provide



Anticipatory Modes of Futuring Planetary Change in Documentary Film

45

us with differing visions of potential futures and in differing ways act as anticipatory devices for prefiguring social change. In an effort to move beyond a classification of documentary film into genres and modes of representation, Michael Renov (1993) proposed that documentary cinema may be conceived as modes of practice with common underlying cultural functions. As a product of technologies, aesthetics, and poetics, Renov proposed four interrelated and overlapping modes of practice, or as he put it, “modalities of desire” or “impulsions which fuel documentary discourse” (Renov, 1993: 22). These are: (a) to record, reveal, and preserve, (b) to persuade and promote, (c) to analyze and interrogate, and (d) to express. For Renov, these four fundamental tendencies can be specifically attributable to documentary practice as rhetorical/aesthetic functions that overlap and determine each other in informing a poetics of documentary film. However, in invoking a model of a poetics for documentary film practice through the exposition of four discursive functions – those of preservation, persuasion, analysis, and expressivity – Renov’s analysis confirms the established prevalent view that documentary film’s main function remains the textual interpretation and representation of historical and present political contingencies. It is not clear where the future rests in this scheme unless it is subsumed within any of the other functions, most likely the expressive function, where Renov locates the consistently undervalued aesthetic function in documentary cinema and where an aesthetic anticipation of the future would certainly be practicable. Consequently, and following Renov’s typology, one of the interests in this essay is to add another category or at least a sub-category: to speculate and anticipate. This cultural function of documentary would also work as a “mode of desire” (Renov, 1993) in rendering an anticipatory futuring of global change. As modes of desires, this category of documentary acts as “a resource of hope” (Williams, 1989) amidst undoubtedly dramatic socio-ecological changes at a planetary scale. Furthermore, documentary cinema can potentially transcend the function of desire, to also encompass a modality of intent: to promote social change and induce a sense that a deep socio-ecological and economic transformation is needed to confront the uncertainties posed by a liquid future. In this way, possibility is not understood as inevitable likelihood and unavoidable probability, but more in terms of what Ernst Bloch refers to as “possibility as capacity” (Bloch, 1986: 232–233), where possibility may be understood as capacity to shape the future as embodied experience. In other words, and advancing Bennett’s critical examination of World Expos, I think documentary cinemas can play a role in instantiating the future by rendering it present and giving it a concrete form, thus permitting viewers to engage with anticipatory modes of futuring of the planet. This certainly entails an interrogation into the options that open (and close) when extending conceptual indexical links to possible events in the future. The films discussed in the following section were chosen because they don’t shy away from a concern with indexicality. Their account of the future does not rely on computer imaging and simulation of a future. While they are in one way or another concerned with a future tense of that could be, would be or might have been, they

46

Juan Francisco Salazar

would not be seen as so-called “subjunctive documentary” films (Wolf, 1999: 290). In Wolf ’s view, the potential of subjunctive documentary is in the affordances made possible by digital simulation for concretizing an imaginary or speculative future. So-called subjunctive documentaries, as Metz notes, have proven relatively popular within cable and free to air television networks and are “profoundly aggressive in their insistence that the fictions they are ‘documenting’ not only could be real but truly are real, because CGI has made them so” (Metz, 2008: 334). Similarly, and in discussing the subjunctive television documentary series Life After People (2008– 2010), Bella Honess Roe has noted that “by juxtaposing the faked indexical-looking computer animated images of the future with indexical images of contemporary examples, Life After People is making claims for the epistemological validity of its digital images. The impact of the digital imagery relies on it looking realistic, which in turn encourages us to believe that this could really happen” (2009: 70). The use of CGI to simulate the instantiation of the future-as-real works on a different register with the use of computer modeling and visualizations in documentary and the way we might want to understand documentary film “as one particular mode of audiovisualization and navigation within a wider repertoire including highly technical modes of scientific modeling” (Walker, this volume). The films chosen in this essay display the prospects of anticipatory modes of documentary filmmaking but do not use CGI and should not be seen as subjunctive documentaries. They materialize the future as a mode of intent; of possibility as capacity of the contemporary, somewhat akin to Paul Rabinow’s proposal of an anthropology of the contemporary where the contemporary becomes – rather than is – “a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and near future in a (nonlinear) space that gauges modernity as an ethos already becoming historical” (Rabinow, 2008: 2). How would a documentary cinema of the contemporary move “through the recent past and near future in a (nonlinear) space”? How would its rhetorical/ aesthetic functions work? In what way does not only history but also the future appear as a contingent set of possibilities about which decisions are demanded? And also, would these functions necessarily need to be grounded in textual efficacy or could these also be judged from a post-representational logic, informed not by what the future is, but what the future becomes? In other words, is it possible to move towards performative alternatives to representationalism in documentary cinema in order to shift the focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality to matters of practices/doings/actions? (Barad, 2003: 802). Would a documentary cinema of the contemporary still be locked in what Elizabeth Cowie (2011: 1) calls “the spectacle of actuality and the desire for reality”? And finally, what different affective registers are possible between an emotional response to the experience of an actual event and one that we experience imaginatively? Comprehensive answers to these questions are well beyond of the scope of this essay. Nevertheless, in the following pages I will attempt to argue the value of speculative approaches for documentary cinema’s anticipatory modes of futuring planetary change. There are several areas of inspiration for attempting this. One is science fiction, another is video games.



Anticipatory Modes of Futuring Planetary Change in Documentary Film

47

Current themes and formal features in contemporary science fiction, particularly the abundant new work and texts that exhibit quite explicit environmentalist preoccupations (Milner, 2011: 5), mark what Raffaella Baccolini terms “a new oppositional and resisting form of writing, one that maintains a utopian horizon in the pages of dystopian science fiction and in these anti-utopian times” (Baccolini, 2004: 518). This notion of anti-utopian times in Baccolini’s work is also echoed in later works that refer to the idea that utopia since the 1980s has become a “bankrupt subject” (Vint, 2009). Hence, in asking the question of the role that documentary cinema may come to play in anticipating or shaping things to come, the promise lies not only in the representation of radical alternatives to the dominant form of advanced techno-capitalism but in the imperative to imagine them in practice. It can be argued that the “main project of all science fiction – that of imagining future histories – is impossible … it has become a case of utopia or catastrophe, and utopia has gone from being a somewhat minor literary problem to a necessary survival strategy” (Robinson, 2011: 15). The concern with the uncertainties that the future posits – the unknown or the infinite, which Walker (this volume) discusses in reference to Yusoff ’s work on scientific visualizations of climate change – has made possible the transformation of science fiction from being a peripheral object of study, to being increasingly placed as a vantage point in several areas of study (such as cultural geography), providing an account of key contemporary theoretical concerns and presenting alternative visions of globalization and its discontents. However, while science fiction remains a prevalent genre within particular literatures and cinemas, it has enjoyed little currency within documentary film studies. Cinematic time has certainly been a core concern in film studies and philosophy but the presentation of the future-real has rarely received critical attention in documentary film theory or practice. This is despite the relatively recent vitality of science fiction writing (Jameson, 2007; Kerslake 2007), which since the early 1990s has glided into the background of contemporary social and cultural theory to offer new perspectives on enduring and emerging ontological dichotomies of human/nonhuman worlds. Science fiction studies has positioned itself as a transdisciplinary field from where to forestall what happens to the planet in an age of “liquid fear” (Bauman, 2006), those types of nebulous fears, which, like the future, not always have a clear and identifiable (solid) referent. In recent years a good number of independent and art-house science fiction films have emerged strongly to posit the conjunctures of post-colonial, post-national, and post-human worlds. Films such as District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, South Africa, 2009), Sleep Dealer (Alex Rivera, US-Mexico, 2008), Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu, Kenya, 2010), Kempinski (Neil Beloufa, France-Algeria-Mali, 2007), Monsters (Gareth Edwards, UK, 2010) among many others, have successfully explored the immanence of alternative possible futures already existing within all our presents. Besides certain science fictional modes of representation and anticipation, another area of inspiration for our fifth category of documentary is games, particularly so-called serious games and games for change. There are several games that posit the question of anticipatory modes of futuring global socio-ecological change.

48

Juan Francisco Salazar

Among the most interesting for the purpose of this chapter are those created by Jane McGonigal, such as World Without Oil (2007), Superstruct (2008), or EVOKE (2010). These are alternate reality games that make players tackle real-world problems at a planetary scale, and are designed as campaigns, live events, or seasons. Superstruct, for example, is a multiplayer online game based on “extreme-scale collaboration” played on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and social media online spaces as part of a project developed at the Institute for the Future, a California-based not-for-profit organization. As other similar “games of multitude” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009: 200), the project developed a thought-provoking performative mode of anticipatory futuring of global catastrophe by attempting to connect fragmented and incomplete narratives of climate change and social upheaval.2 Subjunctive documentaries, animated documentaries, and anticipatory games all challenge the traditional notions of indexicality that underpin documentary’s essential mode of representing the real. In the case of games it is noteworthy that games do craft a different, more performative, understanding of actuality that challenges documentary film as “a mode of representation with its own unique materiality, history, theory, and conventions of practice” (Poremba, 2011: 2). There are of course numerous and influential precedents in the history of documentary cinema that employ techniques of anticipating the future as storytelling device. In a film such as The War Game (1965) for example, Peter Watkins speculated about the aftermath of a nuclear attack on London and southern England. He manufactured an imagined vision of the future/present by pioneering with the combination of fictional and non-fictional elements. Initially commissioned by the BBC and produced only three years after the Cuban missile crisis, the film was censored and the BBC declined to broadcast it “on the grounds that it was too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting’” (Chapman, 2006: 75). Banned for television, the film had a short theatrical release in 1966 and went on to win the Academy Award for best documentary film of 1966. In other films such as Level 5 (1997), Chris Marker ventured into time travel and ways of prefiguring the future. Christa Blümlinger has described Level 5 as a “science-fiction documentary” (Blümlinger, 2010: 3), a claim that is nevertheless never fully developed. One most relevant example also worth mentioning is John Akomfrah’s examination of cultural politics of Pan-African diaspora in his film The Last Angel of History (1997). The essay film remains a keystone of Afrofuturism (Eshun, 2003) through its use of science fiction as a metaphor for the Pan-African experience of forced displacement, cultural alienation, and otherness.3 Another relevant and related film to those being discussed in more detail below is The Age of Stupid (Franny Armstrong, UK, 2009). Combining documentary footage with fictional depictions of the planet devastated by climate change by 2055, the film anticipates many of the future consequences of fossil-fuel dependency. By resorting to a classic persuasive documentary function (in Renov’s typology) the film promotes the view that action must be taken now to mitigate future climate change. Relying on the urge to avoid catastrophe, the film relies on what Renov calls documentary cinema’s most “crucial parameter of persuasion … the veridical stamp of documentary’s indexical sign” (Renov, 1993: 29). And while persuasion can be



Anticipatory Modes of Futuring Planetary Change in Documentary Film

49

understood in The Age of Stupid as an effect of particular histories within specific discursive conditions, it can also be found in its anticipatory consciousness and speculative realist treatment of futurity. In the following sections, I provide a more in-depth encounter with each of the three chosen films. All of them are informed by a sense of radical utopianism, not in the sense of an abstract utopia of a distant (into the future and out of space) perfect world, but in the sense of an ethical and political discourse on the unprecedented level of destruction of our present world. These three films also put forward a notion of concrete utopianism, which in words of Henri Giroux provides “both an ethical discourse for challenging an expansive cynicism regarding social change and a political referent for grounding critique and the possibility of social transformation” (Giroux, 2003: 7). All three films attempt to develop the sort of “anticipatory consciousness” that Bloch contends. And each – perhaps unknowingly – contributes to the release of documentary cinema from its tight ties to realism, not only blurring boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, but also pushing the contours of documentary film in one way or another into the realm of science fiction. Therefore after introducing the three films I will move on to interrogate whether it is possible to suggest a fifth cultural function of documentary – to anticipate – where I draw on recent work in cultural geography which provides innovative accounts on how “across different domains of life the future is now problematized as a disruption, a surprise” and the ways through which this “problematization of the future as indeterminate or uncertain has been met with an extraordinary proliferation of anticipatory action” (Anderson, 2010: 777).

An Epistephilia of the Future: Anticipatory Modes of Futuring in Three Contemporary Documentary Films: The Planet (2006), Into Eternity (2010), and Otilith (2003–2009) In Blurred Boundaries, Bill Nichols commented that documentary film depends on “the specificity of its images for authenticity” (1994: 29). Authenticity in this view has to do with the power of documentary cinema’s claim to the actuality of the real as reflected by events that take place on a tangible spatio-temporal scale. The three films discussed below present challenges to this documentary ontology in the way they attempt to instantiate the future, not necessarily in the ways in which animation, digital CGI simulation, or video games challenge the indexicality of the image. Rather, these films see a future in terms of what Bill Nichols calls the epistephilia of documentary cinema; the pleasure and desire in knowing about the real world. They pose an engagement with the future and what happens to the world: an epistephilia for knowing about the future, or as Patricia Kerslake says “the human desire to experiment with its own future” where the filmmaker becomes an agent provocateur (Kerslake, 2007: 1). As previously stated, this essay speculates on the potentiality for documentary film to develop an account of the future that may move beyond the realm of texts, signification, and representation and into that of ethics, practices, materiality, and

50

Juan Francisco Salazar

affect. This raises documentary film’s capacity to be thought and practiced not merely as a creative treatment of actuality but also as a creative treatment of possibility. Such a concern with possibility and uncertainty, rather than actuality and certainty, means a tangible preoccupation with potentiality, and signposts a different verb tense for documentary film. At least as a grammatical category, it locates situations and events to be documented and accounted for somewhere in the future, with varying degrees of distances in time and space from the viewer. Ben Anderson’s work on “future geographies” provides a useful mode of thinking about the future. For Anderson, “futures become present through epistemic objects (such as insights, trends, stories or models), through materialities and through anticipatory affects including fears, hopes and anxieties” (Anderson, 2010: 786). Futures are also made present through practices that stage an interval between the here and now and a specific future through some form of acting, role play, gaming, or pretending. These are linked to imagination but use the creative capacities of embodiment more explicitly (Anderson, 2010: 786). These ideas are certainly not new in video games, such as the previously mentioned work of Jane McGonigal where games have multiple functions in the context of situations of uncertainty regarding how events in the future will unfold. The use of digital and networked technologies is no doubt shaping a paradigm shift where documentary makers (and audiences) may be one day configured as enactors and not just observers of the future. The following three films point in this direction.

The Planet: Visions of the future – from “wealth” to “illth” The Planet (2006), an 82-minute film directed by Michael Sternberg, Linus Torrell, and Johan Söderberg, has been credited (at the time of writing in 2012) as the most extensive documentary project ever produced in Scandinavia. Shot in 14 countries and using archival footage from another 10, the film is presented as a wake-up call to address the perils of global ecological change. In many ways, thematically and aesthetically, it follows on from previous collaborations around Söderberg’s work, such as Lucky People Center (1998) and Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers (1999). A TV adaptation in four parts was released in 2007: The Earth System; Nature’s Resources; Humankind and Nature; and Choices and Consequences. The Planet deals with several key theoretical concepts in human geography and political ecology to address the relations between humans and the environment of the present and near future. One of them is scale. The film reveals the current record of climate science and promotes a view that climate change, in the words of Anders Blok, “is quickly becoming a ubiquitous socionatural reality, mediating extremes of sociospatial scale from the bodily to the planetary” (Blok, 2010: 896). Similarly to films like The Age of Stupid or An Inconvenient Truth, the film deploys a scalar topology (see also Walker, this volume) to present an account of global change with a straightforward and unequivocal message: by 2050, when human population on the planet is expected to reach nine billion, and the levels of consumption and manufacturing of emerging



Anticipatory Modes of Futuring Planetary Change in Documentary Film

51

economies such as Brazil, China, and India reach the levels of Europe and North America, the planet will simply explode. The film opens with the idea of planet, of a world-scale socio-ecological system, and the now well-known notion that events that take place in one area of the world have profound effects on other parts of it. In fact, The Planet also shares with other of its contemporaries, such as The Age of Stupid or An Inconvenient Truth, an implicit concern with James Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis” of the Earth as a living system capable of dying. The filmmakers present a view of the planet as a life support system where air, water, soil, food are provided “for free,” yet are not factored into economic equations, when in fact biological life could not be supported on Earth without these. Using these ecosystem services without valuing them properly we are in fact affecting the services we depend upon for our life support system. The economy lives off the larger biospheric system; the more we consume the more we waste. What is as stake in The Planet is the issue that at the turn of the twentyfirst century approximately one billion people are consuming more than 80 percent of all goods and services on the planet. As Solte suggests, “if our restriction would be a sustainable exploitation of the environment as the resource basis for our GDP we would need today more than one planet. If all people on the planet would have the same level of consumption we would need more than five planets” (Solte, 2009). The Planet puts forward a vision of the future that is impossible to disregard. Besides overconsumption, the film deals with massive extinction of biodiversity on the planet, asserting that the rate of mass extinction of species is happening at an accelerated pace due to “the human enterprise.” Humans are the only species on the planet with the power to make another species extinct. For Gretchen Daily, one of the interviewees in the film, “even if the existing reserve network were expanded well beyond what anyone thinks is economically or politically feasible it is unlikely we will protect more than maybe 10% of the life forms we share the planet or universe with today.” The film discusses the fact that there is basically no ecosystem on earth that hasn’t been profoundly affected by human intervention from reducing forests and grasslands to croplands to transforming all oceans, rivers, and lakes. We cannot move anymore, as there is no new land on this planet. The film is relentless in its presentation of facts, opinions, and images of how this planetary structure is being put under irreversible pressure due to human activity. And this is not any kind of human activity; it is the activities of finance capital with its structural premise of hyper-consumption and perpetual growth. Sternberg, Torrell, and Söderberg produced the film before the global financial crisis of 2008/2009 and the European debt crisis of 2011/2012, but the film successfully anticipates how “the supposed urgencies of threatened economic and monetary ‘collapse’ occlude and defer any attention to the imperatives of the biosphere” (Cohen, 2012: 13). In fact the main fear implicit in the film is not that of humanity’s inevitable downward spiraling into catastrophe; it is the fear of the non-event. As Cohen puts it, “the event of the twentyfirst century is that there will be no event, that no crisis will disturb the expansion of consumption beyond all supposed limits or peaks” (Cohen, 2012: 14, italics in original). The Planet is a critique of consumer society and the way we are consuming ourselves to death. The film is persuasive in its insistence of how growth is the very core

52

Juan Francisco Salazar

economic cornerstone around which contemporary global society coheres, and as such it attempts to anticipate a movement into an era of “un-economic growth” where “illth” accumulates faster than “wealth.” The film speculates about a potential end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it by 2050 based on scientific knowledge from the present (2000). The film is in no conventional way a science fiction film. It is not set in the future and does not contain defining elements of the genre. Yet it is a film that interrogates the near future by presenting us with a critical dystopic view of an uncontrollable changing present: what does this look like? The film incorporates a sharp critique of wildlife documentaries, which often depict the wilderness as unaffected by human effects or, as George Monbiot in the film states, “a created artificial wilderness invented on television” (06:49). The striking images of wild animals against human infrastructures and waste at the beginning of the film are an outstanding technique for creating an affective (and intellectual) connection to the audience: a rhinoceros eats next to a busy highway; a giraffe stands in the foreground with massive buildings in the background; a zebra stares at an abandoned factory building. This overt vision is developed alongside a covert critique of conservation activism through the use of relevant statistical information: “each year the planet loses a total area of woodland equivalent to the size of Portugal”; “we use about 20% more than what nature can regenerate”; “water is pumped out of the earth more rapidly than what can be replenished.” The Planet plays out as a critical dystopic film where possible futures are anticipated based on the premise that people are not aware of the seriousness of what we could be doing to the planet. It’s meant to be a wake-up call for action, often resorting to the aesthetics of music videos and electronic music, to complement the perspectives of 29 scientists and experts whose opinions mark the rhetorical flow of the film. Despite an overwhelming presentation of facts and evidence on global change, the film concludes rather disappointingly. It discusses lack of action as a sort of human defense mechanism against extinction by which the future of the world has become so gloomy that we can’t act. The level of fear and anxiety is so overwhelming that our systems of coping shut down. Scare tactics don’t work. The film seems to invoke a need to break with the present, a need for “a systemic rupture that opens the way to another world” (Moylan, 2011: 24) where the hope relies on the capacities of civil society to self-organize. In doing so it attempts to anticipate a fractured and fragmented post-climate change society having to deal with a crisis that, as Joel Kovel notes, “is not about an environment outside us, but the evolution, accelerating with sickening velocity, of an ancient lesion in humanity’s relation to nature” (Kovel, 2007: 14).

Into Eternity: Rendering the future Unlike The Planet, which roams rather superficially through many interconnected tropes of global change (particularly climate change), Into Eternity focuses strictly on nuclear waste, brilliantly conveying the phenomenology of a present infused with



Anticipatory Modes of Futuring Planetary Change in Documentary Film

53

futurity. The key subject of the film is a place called Onkalo in the west of Finland where the first spent nuclear fuel repository in the world has been carved four kilometers underground. Work on the facility commenced in 2002 and will be completed in 2020. There is no detaching from the present in either of the two films, quite the contrary. In both films it is possible to observe a persuasive account of the present. Without visualizing a future they both embody a sense of what is happening to the world, of an unknown future world where the real of the present deploys the real-possibility of the future. Into Eternity is as much a film for the present as it is a film for the future. It starts like a science fiction horror film. The camera tracks into what looks like an underground mine. It’s cold. It’s claustrophobic. The director addresses the audience directly on camera and conveys the following message: You are in a place where we have buried something from you to protect you and we have taken great pain to be sure that you are protected. We also need you to know that this place should not be disturbed. And we want you to know that this is not a place for you to live in … you should stay away from this place, and then you will be safe.

The audience being addressed is we in the present as well as we in 200 years. It gets darker and darker as we pierce the interior of the planet. The camera closes in on the walls. The image fades to pitch black and the film director appears on camera by lighting a match. Again addressing directly the audience, director Michael Madsen insists: I am now in this place where you should never come. We call it Onkalo. Means hiding place. In my time it is still unfinished though work began in the twentieth century when I was just a child. Work will be completed in the twenty-second century. Long after my death. Onkalo must last 100,000 years. Nothing built by man has lasted even a tenth of that time-span. But we consider ourselves a very potent civilization. If we succeed, Onkalo will most likely be the longest lasting remains of our civilization. If you, sometime far into the future, find this, what will it tell you about us?

The film was launched in late 2010 a few months before the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the nuclear crisis that followed. In many ways the crisis that unfolded made the film even more timely and contingent when it was exhibited. Several films have been made about nuclear hazard in sites around the world: Chernobyl, India, Australia. But this film is almost entirely shot inside  the underground facility of Onkalo. We rarely escape this enclosure. It becomes a spaceship or a colonial settlement in another planet. Five minutes into the film we see a rare glimpse of the exterior: a shot of an animal standing still behind some trees in a forest covered in thick snow. We already have enormous amounts of nuclear waste all over the world, we are told. If this waste spills out into nature it will cause death and destruction. Large areas will become

54

Juan Francisco Salazar

uninhabitable for a long, long time. As the animal slowly moves to disappear completely behind a tree, the director-narrator continues to address the spectator in the future; “Did that happen? Are there forbidden zones with no life in your time?” As Ford describes it, Into Eternity is a “hauntingly beautiful meditation on the mortality of our civilisation, asking the question: what do we say about ourselves when we create something that will outlast everything we understand?” (Ford, 2010). Into Eternity plays with a notion of planetary scale in both spatial and temporal terms. On the one hand, it considers the wide spatial spread of nuclear waste around the planet; and on the other hand, the temporal extent of duration of nuclear waste into the future. In this regard, the film hopes to document the motivations that drove our civilization to construct such a facility. For director Michael Madsen, the film acts as a palimpsest of sorts: he requests the audience of this audiovisual document in the future to update it into any format more suitable in a future time and add any supplementary knowledge on the Onkalo facility which is presently not known. In this film, the uncertainty of the future is given by the absurdity – or arrogance – of the human endeavor to built an infrastructure that would last for 100,000 years. The “unknowledgeable” becomes the incomprehensible and Madsen’s task is to create a film through which people can try to comprehend this vastness. Both The Planet and Into Eternity invoke a healthy pessimism as a sense of anticipatory consciousness, where hope is effectively enacted and circulated by way of a call to action in a present that anticipates the real possibility of future events that open up a fundamentally different future. Into Eternity is not only a film about nuclear waste and nuclear energy. It is a philosophical and poetic meditation on contemporary humanity. It is a film that indirectly speaks to us here and now by addressing an audience out of this time and out of this space. The film is an interrogation of more-than-human agencies, where the underground facility of Onkalo becomes a main actor in the film. The film masterfully emphasizes the performative aspects of the camera as it takes us through the facility. A montage sequence takes us through the present interim high-level nuclear waste house, the hydraulic cranes, walkways and ladders, the warning signs, lights and alarm horns, depicting the ingenuity of present-day technology to contain a material of more-than-human scale. The emphasis of the film on these material non-human elements of the Onkalo facility as an infrastructural system allows us to think of the film as an interface and metaphor. First, it works as an interface that connects the present to the future, where we, the spectators of today, become we, the spectators in a distant future. And then it also functions as a metaphor of the material politics at play in the storage of nuclear waste. As Madsen conveys in an interview, the world of Onkalo is “an afterworld” where the workers, scientists, and policy-makers interviewed “are already somewhere else out of time” and where the camera tracks weightlessly, floating through the facility as if the viewer was an archaeologist from the future exploring Onkalo for the first time (Madsen quoted in Ford, 2010).



Anticipatory Modes of Futuring Planetary Change in Documentary Film

55

Post-human futures in the Otolith trilogy The Otolith trilogy is an essay-film project (2003–2009) created by the Londonbased Otolith Group in collaboration with Richard Couzins.4 Taken together, the films run for just under two hours and all three are assembled from found footage and images. The first film, Otolith I (2003), which was made partly in response to the invasion of Iraq, draws from the traditions of Russian utopianism to imagine a dystopian future where humans live in space. The storyline speculates with chronicling a new species of humans (mutants) who can only live in low gravity. The second film, Otolith II (2007), engages in a sort of counter-anthropology to create a juxtaposition between the slum area of Dharavi in Mumbai, and the utopian city of Chandigarh planned by Le Corbusier.5 Otolith III (2009) borrows from Indian modernist art and cinema and evokes a prequel to a sci-fi film (The Alien) which Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray planned but never brought to fruition. The trilogy is imbued by post-colonial cultural politics where all three films have one strong uniting theme: the sense of “past potential futures” as a way to provoke a rethinking of what it means to inhabit the present. These past potential futures are markers of unrealized futures evoked through photographic and film archives. While the trilogy functions as a whole, each film performs in its own singularity. In this essay I want to focus on the first installment. In Otolith I, the artists imagine a world “in which sustained periods of microgravity on space stations have led to a permanent impairment in the human ability to cope with terrestrial gravity” (Power 2010). The film’s premise deals with the effects of microgravity on human bodies and consciousness. In the near future, as humans are unable to return to Earth and are born, live, and die in zero gravity environments, a whole reorientation of the relations of humans to space, perception to coordination, and vision to motor activity has also implied the reconfiguration of the coordinates of visual language. Reflecting on the film’s proposition, Nina Power writes: “Humanity has been literally dispossessed of its own worldliness; everything is unbalanced, weightless” (Power, 2010). The film is narrated by a paleoanthropologist born and raised off-world in an agravic future; a woman at home in zero gravity. Unable, like all future humans, to return to Earth, she has devoted a decade to retrieving, restoring, and researching archives of pre-adaptive human existence. By framing the documentary image in terms of scenarios for the future of space habitation, Otolith I readjusts the present until it takes on the temporality of the historical ruin (Arts Catalyst, n.d.). The film is narrated from the future where “extended sojourns in microgravity have exiled a strata of the population to planetary orbit and catalyzed a bifurcation in the human species” (Rogers, 2010). The narrator is Dr. Usha Adebaran-Sagar, a mutant, who reflects on a world of the recent and distant past that is only available to her through the storage of media files and journals of her ancestor Anjalika Sagar (Rogers, 2010). With this narrative device at hand, the filmmakers are able to speak of a troubled present (images of protests prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003) and combine it with archival footage from the recent past (images of Soviet space

56

Juan Francisco Salazar

exploration in the 1970s) and intervals of interiority conjured by personal archive films. As Rogers (2010) suggests, the film evokes a non-metaphorical weightlessness of alien intimacy where the filmmakers are able to ask: can the future become uncertain once again? For Sara Blaylock this combination of documentary and science fiction “allows their work an objective perspective through the creative license that futuristic storytelling provides” (Blaylock, 2011). The future settings in Otolith I resemble, to a point, those in The Planet and other films in that they maintain a realism made transparent via visual familiarity. Images come from a global visual conscious – the Iraq War, the Cold War, and the Palestinian conflict all get equal play. As Power suggests, “the artists work with the world’s images because they ­represent a tangible and verifiable form of human memory. Drawing connections between previously unpaired images, they like to mimic scholastic research and are not afraid to draw conclusions” (Power, 2010). All these films, albeit in differing degrees, employ elements of science fiction to mobilize a notion of critical dystopia about the future of the planet. As Nina Power contends in reference to Otolith, the interest is in “the temporality of past potential futurity” (Power, 2010). In more than one way these films interrogate the notion of the human after climate change on a planetary scale and in the case of Otolith, it accounts for emerging sensibilities and subjectivities on the post-human. Otolith I merges documentary film form with science fiction as a mode of speculative realism “that allows their work an objective perspective through the creative license that futuristic storytelling provides” (Power, 2010). Science fiction can allegorize the present without being nostalgic or hiding from the self-referential. In Otolith, the blending of archival footage and fictional material works to excavate recent history while at the same time speculate on times to come.

Conclusion The Planet, Into Eternity, and the Otolith films are three examples of documentary modes produced in the first decade of the twenty-first century that provide an account not only of what the world is, but more importantly of what the world may be turning into. They all reflect on the future of the planet and deploy a planetary consciousness. In all three cases the future is made present and rendered actionable by attempting to deploy an “anticipatory experience,” showing that the ways of performing futures can differ substantially. All three films present us with the opportunity to engage in an anticipatory exercise in futuring through particular styles, practices, and logics. Here I trace a link with Ben Anderson’s work into future geo­ graphies when he explains how “anticipatory action works through the assembling of: styles through which the form of the future is disclosed and related to; practices that render specific futures present; and logics through which anticipatory action is legitimized, guided and enacted” (Anderson, 2010: 778–779). As previously stated, none of these films would fall into the category of subjunctive documentaries in the sense of relying on computer imaging simulations to show



Anticipatory Modes of Futuring Planetary Change in Documentary Film

57

the future, where simulated images gain their indexical status through the “truths” of a scientific discourse. They all negotiate actuality in specific and contingent ways. Besides their implicit and explicit differences however, the three films presented in this chapter unreservedly deal with the unknown consequences of the anthropocene, a term that, as Ben Dibley notes, “supplies an arresting image of a daunting development: the advent of a geological era of humanity’s own making” (Dibley, 2012). As Dibley poignantly asserts, there is no return to a benevolent Holocene and the anthropocene is here to stay: as a discourse, as the crease of time, as nostalgia for the human, and as an emerging apparatus. The films analyzed in this chapter are very different in their modes of representation, aesthetics, and themes and ultimately all three explore different modes of subjectivity concerned with temporality and understanding the uncertainties of the not-yet, where futures must somehow be known and made present. More specifically, they provide us with three distinct approaches to filmmaking and three divergent views on how the future and the present collide. The films share a fundamental concern: they point to a future and in instantiating that future they render it present and give it a concrete form. However, unlike interactive new media forms such as video games, the documentary film form does not clearly afford the spectator the means with which to practice for the future (within the text) and thus engage in what Bennett referred to “an anticipatory futuring of the self ” (Bennett, 1991: 37–38). To summarize then, the primary concern of this essay has been to interrogate how documentary cinema may engage with the taken-for-granted category of “the future” and in doing so, how it may problematize “the future” in particular contingent ways to explore how it may be anticipated and acted on (in the present). In other words, to invite rethinking into the potentialities of documentary cinema to enact a poetics of hope where the creative and serious use of the future mode becomes a resource for devising learning strategies to imagine ourselves differently into the future. The future of the human species is now situated on a planetary scale. We need to learn to live and know how to inhabit that place called future. This is where documentary cinema can offer novel anticipatory modes of futuring planetary change.

Notes 1 The first film discussed is The Planet, an 82-minute feature-length documentary also released as a four-part 52-minute television series for Swedish TV. The documentary film was also produced as a multiplatform media project including an online game and an online educational campaign aimed at raising public awareness of the future of the planet by examining the threats and possibilities being faced at present. The film was released in ,2006 the same year as Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, and shares with it a certain emphasis on resorting to an apocalyptic imagination. The second film is Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity, a film that brings back the question of nuclear power/waste, in order to show that the expressed perils of nuclear energy that were so prevalent during the second half of the twentieth century (the anxiety of self-annihilation) have not

58

2

3

4

5

Juan Francisco Salazar ­ issipated, but have morphed into a new context of uncertainty as we enter the twentyd first century. In an interview with Madsen, Lauren Wissot describes the film as “a visually and sonically stunning, existential leap into the very future of civilization via Finland’s nuclear waste storage facility Onkalo” (Wissot, 2011). The third example is actually a series of three films produced by the Otolith Group, a London-based artist-led collective and organization that has been experimenting with documentary and essay film forms as way of imagining speculative futures and science fictions. The series presents an interesting convergence of documentary film and science fiction through a mode of speculative realism, mixing archives of visual material with invented ones, excavating recent history and speculating on the times to come. Both The Planet and Into Eternity premiered at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA) in 2006 and 2010 respectively. Both films also received awards at IDFA. The Planet won the Joris Ivens Award in 2006, and Into Eternity won IDFA’s inaugural Award for Best Green Screen Documentary in 2010. The Planet also screened simultaneously in several locations around the world at 8 p.m. GMT on March 21, 2007 as part of the OXDOX:MK Documentary Film Festival. The Otolith Group (Kodwo Eshun, Anjalika Sagar) were shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2010. The game aims to predict what the world might be like in the near future after a computerized Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) forecasts in 2019 that human extinction will occur by the year 2042. The extinction awareness system poses a series of five simultaneous super-threats that players must confront and overcome: a global health pandemic, war over energy resources, the collapse of the world food system, extreme surveillance and control of civil liberties, and a crisis of refugees. In a book inspired by recent trends in positive psychology (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000), McGonigal (2011) has gone farther with the cunning and controversial proposition that “the current state of our planet and society – damaged through widespread environmental destruction, social disintegration and conflict – can be repaired through games” (de Freitas, 2011: 330). The film captivatingly intersects the stories of a time-traveling nomadic character known as the Data Thief with interviews with black cultural figures, including black science fiction writers like Octavia Butler, musicians DJ Spooky and Goldie, the actress Nichelle Nichols, the artist Kodwo Eshun, and the astronaut Bernard A. Harris Jr. The work was initially commissioned by The Arts Catalyst, one of the Britain’s most distinctive arts organizations, distinguished by its unique art commissions that take on collaborative practice between art and science. The project was developed through the Microgravity Interdisciplinary Research, a consortium of European arts organizations coordinated by the Institute for Unstable Media in Rotterdam. As Sagar explains herself, “Otolith II looks at the collapsed urbanism, informal architectures and the pirate modernity of the slum, understood as the city of the future” (http:// otolithgroup.org/index.php?m=project&id=52).

References Anderson, B. (2010) Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 34(6), 777–798. Arts Catalyst (n.d.) Otolith, http://www.artscatalyst.org/projects/detail/otolith/, accessed July 20, 2014.



Anticipatory Modes of Futuring Planetary Change in Documentary Film

59

Baccolini, R. (2004) The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction. PMLA, 119(3), 518–521. Barad, K. (2003) Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. Bauman, Z. (2006) Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bennett, T. (1991) The Shaping of Things to Come: Expo ’88. Cultural Studies, 5(1), 30–51. Bloch, E. (1986) The Principle of Hope. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Blok, A. (2010) Topologies of Climate Change: Actor-Network Theory, Relational-Scalar Analytics, and Carbon-Market Overflows. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28, 896–891. Blümlinger, C. (2010) The Imaginary in the Documentary Image: Chris Marker’s Level Five. Image & Narrative, 11(1), 3–15. Chapman, J. (2006) The BBC and the Censorship of The War Game (1965). Journal of Contemporary History, 41(1), 75–94. Cohen, T. (2012) Introduction. In Cohen, T. (ed.) Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, vol. 1, pp. 13–42. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Cowie, E. (2011) Recording Reality, Desiring the Real. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Freitas, S. (2011) Game for Change. Nature, 470, 330–331. Dibley, B. (2012) “The Shape of Things to Come”: Seven Theses on the Anthropocene and Attachment. Australian Humanities Review, 52. Dyer-Witheford, N. and de Peuter, G. (2009) Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Game. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eshun, K. (2003) Further Considerations on Afrofuturism. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 287–302. Ford, M. (2010) Into Eternity Digs Deep into Our Own Mortality as Conspiracies Are Cast Aside. The Guardian , November 9, 2010. Giroux, H. (2003) Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Resistance: Notes on a Critical Theory of Educational Struggle. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 35(1), 5–16. Jameson, F. (2007) Archaeologies of the Future. London and New York: Verso. Kerslake, P. (2007) Science Fiction and Empire. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Kovel, J. (2007) The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?, 2nd edn. London: Zed Books. Metz, M. (2008) A Fantasy Made Real: The Evolution of the Subjunctive Documentary on U.S. Cable Science Channels. Television & New Media, 9(4), 333–334. McGonigal, J. (2011) Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin Books. Milner, A. (2011) Changing the Climate. Arena Journal, 36(6), 1–7. Morin, E. (2001) Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future. Paris: UNESCO. Moylan, T. (2011) N-H-N: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Dialectics of Ecology. Arena Journal, 36(6), 22–44. Nichols, B. (1994) Blurred Boundaries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Poremba, C. (2011) Real|Unreal: Crafting Actuality in the Documentary Videogame. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Power, N. (2010) Waiting for the Future. Frieze, 129, 90–93. Rabinow, P. (2008) Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

60

Juan Francisco Salazar

Renov, M. (1993) Theorizing Documentary. New York: Routledge. Robinson, K.S. (2011) Remarks on Utopia in the Age of Climate Change. Arena Journal, 36(6), 8–21. Roe, A.H. (2009) Animating Documentary. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Southern California, http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/ p15799coll127/id/257788/rec/7, accessed July 19, 2014. Rogers, B. (2010) Otolith I, http://otolithgroup.org/index.php?m=project&id=5, accessed July 20, 2014. Seligman, M.E.P. and Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000) Positive Psychology: An Introduction. American Psychologist, 55(1), 5–14. Solte, D. (2009) Global Financial System in Balance: Crisis as Opportunity for a Sustainable Future. Berlin: Terra Media Verlag. Vint, S. (2009) Possible Fictions: Blochian Hope in The Scar. Extrapolation, 50(2), 276–292. Williams, L. (2011) Shadows of the Holocene: Transfigurations of the Non-Human World in Science Fiction Film. Arena Journal, 36(6), 196–215. Williams, R. (1989) Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, ed. Robin Gable. London and New York: Verso. Wissot, L. (2011) Into Eternity: An Interview with Michael Madsen. Global Comment, February 2, 2011, http://globalcomment.com/2011/into-eternity-an-interview-withmichael-madsen/, accessed July 20, 2014. Wolf, M. (1999) Subjunctive Documentary: Computer Imaging and Simulation. In Gaines, J.M. and Renov, M. (eds.) Collecting Visible Evidence, pp. 274–291. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

3

Projecting Sea Level Rise Documentary Film and Other Geolocative Technologies Janet Walker

The catastrophe of climate change is excessive and will inscribe all earthly space. It is earth writing writ large. Kathryn Yusoff (2009: 1010)

Introduction1 Part way into the documentary film Someplace with a Mountain (2010), the director Steve Goodall describes how the people of Puluwat atoll in the Federated States of Micronesia first learned of climate change-induced sea level rise. They had been making their own observations of high waters and the effects of encroaching salinity on crops. However, according to the film, it was only when Goodall fetched a laptop computer from his sailboat anchored in the cove and showed the gathered islanders Al Gore’s and Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) that they realized the extent of the problem. “I made friends with the chief,” Goodall reports to the camera from the deck of his boat, “a young chief named Ioki [cut to images of the Ioki Alet surrounded by children]; I mean, just [a] fantastic guy and his family, it’s beautiful … And always in the back of my mind was sea level rise, sea level rise. What’s going to happen to these people?” Goodall then describes in retrospect how he finally got up the courage to ask about their preparations and how Alet reacted immediately, running across the island to draw in other chiefs and elders. This urgency is conveyed – in a way, reenacted – through a hand-held camera bobbing along a path through the tropical foliage. It is then that we see a shot of the laptop on a desk and hear Gore’s voice A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

62

Janet Walker

Figure 3.1  Someplace with a Mountain. Still frame reproduced courtesy of Steve Goodall.

emanating from it, as the surrounding men discuss and imitate with sweeping gestures An Inconvenient Truth’s animation of predicted, encroaching sea level rise in the Shanghai area. Chevy Chase as narrator of Someplace with a Mountain takes over from Gore and the now soundless excerpt from the latter’s film breaks free of the laptop and enlarges to fill our distant screens (Figure 3.1): “They knew the sea had been rising,” Chase intones, “but they didn’t understand that the worst was yet to come. When they saw the animated graphic of rising water levels, they understood immediately the true seriousness of their situation.” The extent of sea level rise in this particular area, we’re told, is already among the highest on the planet.2 “It was the end of their world and you could see it in their faces,” recalls Goodall. Reaction shots – still and moving – of men, women, and children reveal their shocked expressions in being confronted with the planetary scale of the problem. There are aspects of this documentary with which I take issue, informed by the literature of new ethnography. For one, the sequence uncritically recapitulates “first contact,” with great white men and their all-knowing technology bringing “civilization” to stunned natives.3 Elsewhere in the film there is the verbal characterization of Pacific atoll inhabitants as “suspended in time,” and “still living their traditional, independent, and sustainable ways they have for almost three millennia” (while consumer goods pervade the shots). This denial of coevalness – that is, “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse” (Fabian, 1983: 31, italics original) – is particularly egregious given the profound and instantaneous response by the Puluwatese to a symptom of global warming still largely neglected by the developed world. Nevertheless, I believe the film is significant as an activist work and, even more importantly, for the links it makes – and/or makes possible – between the affective and geospatial registers. Human geographer Carol Farbotko and earth and environmental



Projecting Sea Level Rise

63

scientist Helen V. McGregor call for greater attention to “the emotional geographies of climate change, and the ways in which science and emotion combine with reformist or radical potential” (Farbotko and McGregor, 2010: 164). Goodall’s ethnographic film, unlike others in which only the narrating filmmaker or ­ anthropologist speaks to the audience, includes articulate and moving statements by locals and their embodied presence in the increasingly affected environment.4 Thus, in addition to bringing Gore to Puluwat, Someplace with a Mountain transports emotionally charged islander testimonials across Micronesia and into spaces where they may be witnessed by viewers on our own “psychogeographic journeys” (Bruno, 2002: 6). An Inconvenient Truth, for its part, has been subject to a great deal of criticism: from climate skeptics of the political right wing to those expressing annoyance with the autobiographical elements (read as careerist partisan politics or as an insult to the audience’s ability to connect with a film minus a crusading hero). My environmental media students find the film’s listing of “solutions” in the end credits to be too little too late. Moreover, the film barely depicts affected individuals other than scientists or other opinion leaders. Two photos shot on Tuvalu by Mark Lynas are an exception,5 yet their use in An Inconvenient Truth has been criticized by Farbotko since, ironically, it is to illustrate Gore’s point that “the people on these Pacific islands have all had to move to New Zealand.” Not quite all, Farbotko points out (2010: 58). In any case, the overall absence of people serves to downplay sensations of human suffering and maintain the focus on scientific argument. As with Someplace with a Mountain, though, An Inconvenient Truth has its exemplary attributes. The Gore/Guggenheim work is a premier environmental documentary of the current wave, recipient of numerous accolades including an Academy Award. Its graphic animation of coastal areas being flooded, in combination with the citation of population numbers of coastal residents, presages climate migration on a massive scale. Gore’s refrain “this is what would happen” – accompanied by anxiety-producing musical cues – is applied to Florida and then, after an ominous pause, to the San Francisco Bay Area. After describing what would happen in The Netherlands (their impressive flood protection infrastructure notwithstanding) as “absolutely devastating,” he moves from the West to the Far East and begins to mention the huge numbers of people who would be forced to relocate. From a perspective that is historical and long-term on the one hand, and urgent on the other, the film draws on scientific extrapolation to advocate mitigation of the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. This chapter takes these two films’ common subject of sea level rise6 and the embedding of the one film into the other as an opportunity to read the works relationally and spatially. In Atlas of Emotion, Giuliana Bruno conceptualizes the motion picture as a form of “site seeing,” defining the medium, poetically, as “the very synthesis of seeing and going – a place where seeing is going” (2002: 15–53, 245). This motile sense of cinema seems to me apposite for studying Someplace with a Mountain as a site-specific or “situated” documentary where movement and location loom large. I choose to regard this film – among others with perambulatory subjects and

64

Janet Walker

makers and moving cameras – as a kind of a navigational technology. Then, factoring in the technically rich means An Inconvenient Truth uses to convey the impending need for people to retreat from coastal areas, a second goal of this chapter is to envision these documentaries within a substantially wider repertoire of geolocative screen media that includes modes of scientific modeling and geoweb-based programs and applications for digital earth mapping. These other “discourses of sobriety” – to embrace the geosciences within the ­kinship structure Bill Nichols describes for documentary and other nonfictional systems (“science, economics, politics, foreign policy, education, religion, welfare” [1991: 3–4]) – take various media forms: live action, animated, computer- or webbased, interactive, moving, graphic, photographic, or any combination thereof. And they are all, as documentary scholars know about our purview, rhetorically nuanced in their design and construction. Together and separately, they participate in the shaping of the physical and social spaces they may seem only to access, observe, measure, model, or move through. Furthermore, just as digital technologies of modeling, mapping, visualization, and systemization are proliferating, so too are new scholarly approaches. The literature at the intersection of geography with literary, historical, and media studies is burgeoning and an interdiscipline known as the “spatial humanities” or the “geohumanities” is forming (Rumsey, 2009; Bodenhamer, Corrigan, and Harris, 2010; Dear et al., 2011; Gregory and Ell, 2007; Cope and Elwood, 2009). Although scholars characterizing this development point to a friction between the humanities’ treatment of knowledge “as multivalent, equivocal, and protean” and the scientific privileging of empirical study and disambiguation (Harris, Corrigan, and Bodenhamer, 2010: 169), actually, at the same time that humanists are curious about geospatial tools, geographers are aware of geography’s epistemological nature and thorough imbrication with cultural, social, and political practices and ideologies (Gregory, 1993; Massey, 1994; Smith, 2008).7 From within film and media studies, therefore, I am interested in developing our spatial consciousness and perception of the media textuality of scientific visualization and geographic information systems (GIS).8 Facing outward, I am interested in articulating what film and media studies has to offer geospatial research, including especially critical human geography as an approach to place and environment. Spatial humanities researchers Alexander von Lünen and Wolfgang Moschek understand a GIS as “an active component” and not a neutral medium for the presentation of a research outcome. “We employ GIS,” they state, “as a geographically induced heuristics in historical research” (2011: 249). Similarly, the project of this chapter is to engage with screen-based navigational technologies as an “active component” and “geographically induced heuristics” to investigate how people in coastal areas form attachments to and also shape the places they inhabit. What are the conceptual elective affinities or frictions among geolocative representations of people and places, among geographical imaginations (Gregory, 1993), if you will? Kathryn Yusoff has termed catastrophic climate change a form of “earth writing writ large” (2009: 1010). As the inhabitants of low-lying Pacific islands



Projecting Sea Level Rise

65

imagine, plan for, and seek to exert agency over their future lives, this chapter proposes geolocative media, in combination with environmental activism, as a potentially eloquent form of “earth re-writing.”

Land and Water The primary message of Someplace with a Mountain is that the traditional self-sufficiency of the outer islanders – especially the Puluwatese – is threatened by sea level rise, and that, in moving out of harm’s way to a high island area, at least some of them should keep together as an isolated group in order to maintain their cultural practices “uncontaminated” by other influences. The sequence following the importation of An Inconvenient Truth to Puluwat opens with rain falling on a slate grey sea. Several interlocutors remark on the sore irony of islanders being harmed by industrialized nations’ profligate use of fossil fuels. “We know the water is getting higher and higher and we are going to lose our homes,” states Chief Manuel Taromai, seated on a cushion among the mats, pillows, and blankets in an interior space (Figure 3.2a). “We are not the ones who polluted the whole world.” The subtitle of this statement persists over a shot of inundated plants that used to stand clear of the ocean (Figure 3.2b). A wave crashes against the base of a downed palm, its top partially submerged. We meet Francis of Lamotrek who gestures across the remains of a taro patch. No crops can grow there any longer, he explains. We see him at the left of the frame, where, in the center, a pool of water – saltwater incursion – reflects the blue sky. This depiction of the islanders’ blameless vulnerability might be read as a productive social ecological critique: those already without resources beyond the subsistence level tend to be disproportionately affected by so-called natural disasters that are in fact anthropogenic.9 Or the depiction of island culture as untainted by consumerism might be read as expeditious.10 If, as Goodall believes, the inhabitants of small low-lying islands will be obliged to relocate, and since he sees their culture as worthy of preservation because it is traditional, then playing up this claim to prospective hosts may well make the climate migrants more culturally appealing and less threatening as competitors for jobs in their new location.11 The pointedly ethnographic material Goodall has shot therefore becomes his – and, by extension, the islanders’ – calling card on the island of Yap. We see him with Francis overlooking an uninhabited, high-elevation area on Yap that, he says, could support about 1000 relocated people. Then, in a second film-within-a-film sequence, we see Goodall entering the Yap State Legislature. In the Office of the Governor he screens a montage of his own footage for an audience of gathered politicians and residents of Yap. “It’s tragic to lose their islands because they’re so beautiful,” he says in introducing the presentation. “But the real tragedy is to lose the culture that is totally self-sufficient and doesn’t use fossil fuels.” Across the table we make out on the laptop images of islanders weaving thatch and a theme familiar from earlier sequences: “Still living the traditional, independent, and sustainable ways they have for almost three

66

Janet Walker

(a)

(b)

Figure 3.2a and Figure 3.2b  “We are not the ones who polluted the whole world.” Coastal inundation in Someplace with a Mountain. Still frames reproduced courtesy of Steve Goodall.

millennia. Every essential is done by hand. Everything is done for the good of the village. Could this truly be the last utopia?” Well, perhaps. But not for the qualities such a salvage ethnography is capable of conveying. In fact, Someplace with a Mountain dispenses with many of the tangible and intangible realities of life as it is currently lived on Puluwat, including, signi­ ficantly, major privileges of the islanders’ citizenship. The Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), in which Chuuk is a state and Puluwat (alternative spellings,



Projecting Sea Level Rise

67

Polowat and Poluwat) a coral atoll and municipality, has had the political status since 1986 of a sovereign nation under a Compact of Free Association with the United States. This status enables the US education of FSM citizens (which is mentioned in the film), and also (left out of the film) travel without a visa by FSM citizens to places including Guam, Hawaii, and the US mainland. More than half of the people once living on Puluwat now live abroad, such that a large proportion of current inhabitants are children and older people. In the FSM overall, “aid counts for at least one third of the GNP” and locals are also supported by “remittances sent from family living abroad” (Barnett and Campbell, 2010: 7–8). The islanders’ so-called sustainable ways are enmeshed within and supported by a broad geographic network extending well beyond the islands themselves. I communicated with two Chuukese individuals living in California to confirm what I was reading about the area. Vid Raatior, who was raised on the islands of Onoun and Tamatam just to the north of Puluwat and on Houk (formerly Pulusuk) just to the south, queried why the assistance Goodall promised as a follow-up to the filming could not take the form of “rebuilding the terrible elementary and high schools, buying textbooks, water catchments for potable water, etc.” instead of funding a move to another island (pers. comm., December 22, 2011). Schools? No such buildings, dilapidated or otherwise, are shown on Puluwat. Given that Goodall has to a large extent framed out the aspects of Puluwatese life that don’t fit within the narrative of a culture unchanged for millennia, we are left to wonder about the plastic bags, glass bottles, snorkels, and flip-flops that pass through our field of vision without explanation. And actually, even though the film has a stake in the depiction of island culture as unchanging, it also contributes by its very existence to the islanders’ imagination of dispersed audiences and new horizons.

(Re)mapping “A Sea of Islands with Their Inhabitants” What other options are there for illustrating the plight of islanders and how can we deepen our spatially attuned thinking about the problem? An essay by Fijian anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa is noteworthy in this regard. Hau’ofa powerfully refutes the notion that islands and island states across Polynesia and Micronesia “are much too small, too poorly endowed with resources, and too isolated from the centres of economic growth for their inhabitants ever to be able to rise above their present condition of dependence on the largesse of wealthy nations” (1993: 4). Micronesia’s physical geography is characterized by great distances and comparatively small landmasses. The FSM comprises 607 small islands in what are known as the Eastern and Western Caroline Islands for a total land area of only 270.8 square miles over more than one million square miles of the Pacific Ocean. Nevertheless, Hau’ofa’s insight was to perceive “a gulf of difference” between islander and outsider thinking. “The idea of smallness is relative,” he writes, “it depends on what is included and excluded in any calculation of size” (1993: 6). In fact it was “the continental men, Europeans and Americans who drew imaginary

68

Janet Walker

lines across the sea, making the colonial boundaries that for the first time confined ocean peoples to tiny spaces” (1993: 7). Instead of using the term “Pacific Islands,” with its connotations of “small areas of land surfaces sitting atop submerged reefs or seamounts,” Hau’ofa nominates “Oceania” to connote “not only land surfaces, but the surrounding ocean as far as they could traverse and exploit it.” “Our ancestors,” he tells us, “viewed their worlds as a ‘sea of islands,’ rather than ‘islands in the sea’” (1993: 7). The geographical imagination of Someplace with a Mountain contrasts with that of Hau’ofa. Just as the field of contemporary documentary studies was founded on the premise that documentary films, while accepted as non-fiction, are nevertheless structured in and through their profoundly “fictive” strategies (Renov, 1993: 2–3; see also Nichols, 1991), so too is there a “fictive” quality to documentary space. This is the case, I believe, even when the given documentary is shot in and depends for its meaning on a specific location. Instead of a “sea of islands,” Someplace presents a pre-Oceanian (in Hau’ofa’s sense) geography that emphasizes island smallness, isolation, and vulnerability and de-emphasizes multiplicity, connectivity, fluidity, and the agency of islanders. The film’s first shot is of a distant island, its flat top visible above a wide and otherwise empty horizon.12 People are first seen after a tilt up from footprints in the sand to the two local children who made them. The third to last shot of the film (in the Epilogue) is a long take from a high angle looking down at four children in a small canoe. For much of the time there is no horizon in sight. The space around them is an expanse of opaque aquamarine in which the children appear profoundly isolated (Figure 3.3). This is not to minimize the considerable threat of sea level rise to low-lying islands nor the challenges of expressing Oceania in documentary form. Rather, my point is to exemplify the eminently ideological implications of this particular documentary geography.

Figure 3.3  Someplace with a Mountain. Still frame reproduced courtesy of Steve Goodall.



Projecting Sea Level Rise

69

Farbotko describes a further problem attendant upon perceptions of “smallness.” Disappearing islands in the South Pacific, she submits, are saddled with the burden of “proof of a global climate change crisis” (2010: article abstract; see also Cameron, 2011) and are therefore rendered expendable in the “onward sweep of both climate activism and its opponent, capitalist modernity” (2010: 58). Pacific islands have become, she concludes, a “litmus” test of global warming and, even more unfortunately, a site of “wishful sinking.”

Other Technologies of Navigation Characterizing the difference between European and Puluwatese seafaring, Levinson, Ward, and Webb (1973) explain that while “[t]he European at sea in a small vessel, tends to envisage his situation as one in which his craft moves towards, passes by, and then away from fixed islands … the Puluwat navigator, once on course, inverts the concept and in his navigational system considers the canoe to be stationary and the islands to move towards and past him” (Levinson et al., 1973). As a navigational technology extraordinaire, the Google Earth web application greatly multiplies this Western proclivity for speed, and for moving towards, by, and away from objects of consequently fleeting interest; for “flying to” as the Google interface would have it, but also “flying from,” one could say. Echoing the navigational orientation and practices of the European seafarers, the Google Earth vessel runs counter to the canoes of island navigators who evidently – steering by the sun, stars, and planets; by reefs, land masses, and marine animals; by swell, waves, currents, and winds; and by the curvature of the earth’s surface – remained present and centered in their environment. On the (admittedly small) screen of my laptop, I locate the FSM. At an altitude (“eye alt” in Google Earth terminology) of 3600 km, one can compose a frame in which Guam, Papua New Guinea, and Tuvalu are visible in a triangular relationship, with Yap just to the southwest of Guam (Figure  3.4). But the actual contours of Puluwat (and Tuvalu and Guam for that matter) are invisible from this distance. Zooming in to eye alt 1498 km and rotating the image clockwise from due north, I manage to frame the main islands of the state of Chuuk, where Puluwat is located, in the lower right corner, with the island of Yap in the upper left. But still, specific geographic features are barely visible. Zooming in even further to get the lay of the land, one loses the broader orienting points. For the names of villages on the atoll to pop up, everything else must be relegated beyond the margins. Through its visual capacity and haptic features, the Google Earth web application necessitates a choice between the broader orienting view or the locally refined details.13 Navigation in the South Pacific via Google Earth is also challenging because of the nature of “landmarks.” Those that do appear are ocean reefs, banks, and ridges, features less familiar to those of us continental dwellers who are oriented to lakes, mountains, and deserts. For example, attempting to navigate laterally from Palikir, Micronesia to Manila, Philippines at a certain altitude, say Google Earth eye alt 450,

70

Janet Walker

Figure 3.4  Framing Yap and Tuvalu in Google Earth.

one might become lost in sea of blue. But if one embarks over approximately the same distance east from California to Atlanta there are, literally, landmarks along the way: the Salton Sea, the Grand Canyon, the Mississippi River. It is not these formal aspects alone that matter, but rather how they make meaning in relation to the geographic information program’s overall “geometry of social/ power relations” (Massey, 1994: 4). Released in 2005 by Google corporation, Google Earth eschews established boundaries while at the same time profiting from the disparities that these boundaries – as manifestations of the colonial imagination Hau’ofa invoked – maintain. As satellite media scholar Lisa Parks explains: [t]he very production of Google Earth software is symptomatic of a global economy in which most nation-states are unable to control the production and circulation of representations of their own territories and those transnational corporations that own and operate satellite and computer technologies – the technologies of high visual capital – are able to generate huge profits from such a condition of disparity. (Parks, 2010: 260)

The images we see as we fly around include those gathered over 50 years by multiple US federal agencies but then repurposed in the web application to which Google Earth owns the proprietary rights (Parks, 2010: 259–260). It is a conceit that Google Earth is a free and democratic service for the realization of fantasies of “digital nomadism,” “bodily transcendence,” instant connectivity,” and the annihilation of time and space (Parks, 2004: 37). Responding to Parks’s exhortation to take seriously



Projecting Sea Level Rise

71

“the material specificities and limits of network infrastructures” (2004: 37–38), I would add that the expenditure of different fuels made to secure Google Earth’s combination of satellite, space shuttle, and airplane aerial imagery directly connect this earth-mapping system to the problems of global warming and sea level rise. Someplace with a Mountain also fantasizes borderlessness, harkening back, again, to past millennia. As Goodall describes his discovery of the area of Micronesia where the film takes place, narrating how he sailed in the Caribbean and then through the Panama Canal and to and past the islands of the Galapágos, the Marquesas, Tahiti, Tongo, Fiji, Tuvalu, Kirabati, and the Marshalls, the film presents an aerial map of this whole area with each spot illuminated in turn by a kind of lighthouse visual effect. The film then settles on a group of atolls including Puluwat, Ifalik, and Lamotrek (Figure 3.5). This map emphasizes, by its choices of scale and labeling, the atolls’ physical nature as a proximate cluster. Chase’s narration chimes in a bit later explaining that the people living in this area of the Pacific from Papua New Guinea to Hawaii are all the descendants of the “Lapita navigator explorers who sailed and settled these waters 500 years before the birth of Christ.” Later in the film, when we see Goodall screening his footage for citizens on Yap, he explains that the Yapese regard the inhabitants of “these endangered atolls” as their cultural kin from less developed times. But actually, proximity and visual grouping notwithstanding, Puluwat is in the FSM state of Chuuk whereas Lamotrek is on the other side of the stateline, in Yap (Figure 3.6). Raatior finds these distinctions historically important and has objected to the conflation of peoples as a case of the consistent failure of Westerners to ­distinguish among sub-groups of blacks, Asians, and Pacific Islanders. “[S]how the film to any outer islanders from Polowat or the other islands in Yap (Elato, Fais, Ulithi) and they would, like me, be offended at the terrible way that Goodall uses scenery and people from elsewhere to tell the story of the Polowatese” (pers. comm.,

Figure 3.5  Someplace with a Mountain’s proximate cluster. Still frame reproduced courtesy of Steve Goodall.

Janet Walker

72

N

North Pacific Ocean

Northern Mariana Islands (U.S.)

W

E S

Guam (U.S.)

Federated States of

MARSHALL ISLANDS

Micronesia

C

A

R

Yap

O

Colonia

YAP

L

I

N

E

I

S

L

A

N

D

Weno

S

Palikir Pohnpei

CHUUK

POHNPEI 400 mi

Kosrae

KOSRAE

400 km EQUATOR

0°

A

SI

NE

DO

IN

South Pacific Ocean PAPUA NEW GUINEA

SOLOMON ISLANDS

Figure 3.6  State lines in the Federated States of Micronesia.

December 22, 2011).14 The film’s editing, he believes, encourages this problematic logic of similarity and mixing. I agree. Not only are we given the impression (see n. 12) that an outer atoll of Lamotrek is Puluwat (this type of expeditious substitution occurs frequently in documentary editing), but furthermore the film edits together – absent information that would allow us to distinguish them – shots from different islands in the cluster. Amanda Tachibelmel, introduced as a mother and educator on the island of Ifaluk (subtitular spelling), emphasizes the need to maintain traditional culture, dress, and rituals, and the role of women in decision-making. We see a girl weaving a red and yellow band, two girls playing guitars, a community gathered at the beach, children two-by-two in a procession, and a woman weaving at a loom. Then the film returns to Saplan Bessy, to whom we were previously introduced. He is interviewed and observed on Puluwat building a canoe with the help of young



Projecting Sea Level Rise

73

apprentices who are learning the craft. The film then cuts back to Tachibelmel and a community thatched roof-raising on Ifaluk. Distinguishing sub-cultures is important, not only in principle, but also in terms of policy. Watching the non-subtitled DVD copy of the film he received from Goodall, Raatior understood Yapese officials to be offering aid to small islanders from Yap’s but not to those from Chuuk’s outer islands (pers. comm., December 19 and 22, 2011). While I strongly appreciate Hau’ofa’s allusions to pre-colonial Oceania as a resuscitated spatial consciousness that empowers islanders in the present, it seems important in this case to acknowledge contemporary islanders’ own assertions of cultural specificity and their coevalness with powerful nations and other entities that would usurp self-determination. Listening to islanders characterizing their territory goes hand in hand with acknowledging the benefits of their participation in intergovernmental planning (through the Alliance of Small Island States, for example) as well as local decision-making.

Futurity Practices If findings by local residents, filmmakers, and scientists (groups not mutually exclusive) have revealed the reality of Pacific Ocean sea level rise, the amount and time-frame of that rise are far from clear. How much will the seas rise in any given spot? When will it happen? What impacts will be felt? Will people living on islands lacking high or even moderate elevation areas be obliged to leave entirely, since there is no inland retreat? If so, when and where will they go? In the fall of 2011, Goodall was talking to audiences at screenings of Someplace with a Mountain about his intention to return to the South Pacific in order to help the Puluwatese and also to videotape their process of deciding which aspects of the proffered aid to accept.15 I convened an interdisciplinary group of scholars to brainstorm what types of information would be helpful to the islanders.16 Professor Emeritus Oran Young of the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara, a world leader in international governance and environmental institutions, characterized the vagaries of the situation by telling us that it might be one or two hundred years before the full effects of melting ice and thermal expansion are felt, but that even now there is increased volatility of ocean and air systems. Goodall is concerned that a big storm could blow through at any point with a king wave capable of wreaking devastation on Puluwat. To understand and predict the results of sea level rise – whether Puluwat will “sink” into the sea, and if so, how soon – various types of information from a wide array of research specialties is necessary: measurements of sea surface and coastal elevations,17 maps of physical features; estimations of water volumes and flows;18 information about physically adaptive architectures, such as sea walls and flood control engineering, and social architectures, such as policy planning and interrelationships among groups. Extrapolating future occurrences through a range of futurity practices is crucial, and yet there are enormous differences in tone and validity among such practices.

74

Janet Walker

In this regard, the previously discussed projected sea level sequence bears further examination. An Inconvenient Truth’s coastal inundation animations – commissioned from visual effects expert Brian Fisher, whose numerous big-budget film credits include District 9, Avatar, Tron: Legacy, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon – are technically impressive as well as awesome to behold. On the commentary track director Davis Guggenheim attests to the achievement of the sequence: When Al gave his slide show, and I saw it, these were still pictures, and to me [animating them] … this is one of the most devastating things in the movie. I just couldn’t imagine what would happen to all the people who lived under this water. This was actually extremely technically difficult to actually find out where the levels of sea level rise would be on these maps in an accurate way. All these maps are exactly accurate. And then animating how the water would seep into these areas. It was actually very very difficult. It took us months to do. It looks very simple.

It does seem apparent, as Gore states, that tens of millions of people will soon be on the move. However, the statement that the “maps are exactly accurate” invites qualification. Scientists tend to perceive the challenge to map the world’s existing coastline, predict its changing contours, and evaluate its vulnerability to sea level rise as ongoing rather than as achievable through a few months of hard work. Pioneering GIS geographer Michael Goodchild often references the French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrat to make the point that the length of a coastline is in fact indefinite (unknowable, infinite) since the measurement becomes greater according to the refinement of the measuring instrument and the scale of the physical feature being measured.19 A.T. Vafeidis and colleagues explain that “[d]espite being one of the most distinct features on the earth’s surface … the coast has always been difficult to represent due to its dynamic nature and to the multi-dimensionality of information associated with it” (2004: 802). Of course these creators of what is a major European Union coastal mapping project tackle the problem nevertheless, by combining GIS processing of datasets with a new technique for spatially referencing coastal features called “dynamic segmentation.” But they do so while highlighting the relationships among “how information is presented,” the “organization and reliability of a database,” and decision-making;20 that is to say, with a respect for knowledge as “multivalent, equivocal, and protean.” I decided to search for scientific counterparts to the extrapolative animations of coastal inundation in An Inconvenient Truth, with a focus on the Pacific island area under discussion here (but left out of Gore’s film). This scientific knowledge, while medium specific and analytically distinct, can be pooled with Someplace with a Mountain’s ethnographic “modeling” of the coast, its inhabitants, and the coming changes. Interactive visioning tools are proliferating online. The Digital Coast project of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a web map visualization tool called climateGEM created at the University of Arizona are state of



Projecting Sea Level Rise

75

the art for sea level rise visualization.21 NOAA’s and the University of Arizona’s models show inundation at six meters, while Alex Tingle’s Google Earth hack models flooding up to 60 meters!22 In general and in comparison with Gore’s didactic certainty, these geospatial mapping tools are often accompanied by statements of their own limitations. The NOAA tool has a button labeled “confidence.” Clicking on it, one reads, “The inundation areas depicted in the Sea Level tab are not as precise as they may appear.” A “Mapping Confidence” slider is provided; blue is for “High Confidence,” ochre for “Low Confidence.” The “Understanding the Map” section indicates: [t]here are many unknowns when mapping future conditions, including natural evolution of the coastal landforms … as well as the data used to predict the changes. The presentation of confidence in these maps represents only the known error in the elevation data and tidal corrections.

Tingle blogs about “significant sources of inaccuracy,” including that his model “knows nothing about the tides” and “takes no account of the effects of coastal erosion” nor of coastal defenses. And, in fact, he reports, the NASA data he has drawn on “is not very accurate” (http://blog.firetree.net). Whereas Guggenheim and Gore purport to exact accuracy, geographers are careful to map on the basis of multiple data sources, and they often signal where data is lacking, especially when it comes to coastal modeling. It is true that the critique I leveled at Google Earth applies here too: regional, disparities in interactive visioning disfavor the South Pacific. The FSM is difficult to locate. Zooming in, one loses one’s bearings. Zooming out, the islands appear minute and ultimately invisible. Moreover, with the NOAA and University of Arizona tools one cannot travel southwest from California to the South Pacific. Attempts to do so bring one to the edge of the map. One must navigate in the other direction, east across Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Papua New Guinea. The inputting of data for the South Pacific has not been prioritized. The NOAA tool does not, as this time of writing, contain information about future inundation in the FSM. The University of Arizona tool climateGEM contains limited information, less than for other regions. Nevertheless, in keeping with the scientists’ greater and the filmmakers’ lesser acknowledgement of uncertainty, the gaps in information on the interactive visioning sites tend to be textually marked. Phrases such as “map data not yet available” (climateGEM) are incorporated, and “We are sorry, but we don’t have imagery at this zoom level for this region. Try zooming out for a broader look” (flood.firetree.net) (Figure 3.7). Another epistemological difference between An Inconvenient Truth and these tools is relative movement. The interactive visioning tools are, precisely, interactive, but not animated: the user him/herself adjusts the elevation to see progressive inundation at the different levels, rather than sitting back and watching the animated sea roll in. Thus, whereas sea level rise in An Inconvenient Truth appears inexorable, modeling by the tools allows contemplation of what may or may not occur.

76

Janet Walker

Figure 3.7  A suggestion from flood.firetree.net: “Try zooming out for a broader look.”

From a critical perspective, therefore, the didacticism and unacknowledged limits of An Inconvenient Truth’s scientific basis are problematic. And yet, embracing the complexity of texts and thought, I do still believe that there are critical as well as practical grounds for celebrating the film’s bold advocacy work. An Inconvenient Truth’s animations might be regarded as productively “excessive” in the way Yusoff (2009) supports. This is not to fall into a crisis mode of panicked response,23 but rather to accept the need to act, even in the face of uncertainty and given that “mapping confidence” is never full. Yusoff is critical of the timidity of The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Solomon et al., 2007) because, even as it projected a global sea level rise of ~60 centimeters (nearly two feet) by 2100 due to the thermal expansion of sea water and the melting of glaciers (Nicholls and Cazenave, 2010: 1517), the report pointed only implicitly toward abrupt change (Yusoff, 2009: 1010). As she explains: the catastrophic failure of the ice sheet was seen by the IPCC as an excessive, unpredictable event (the problem of rising sea levels was not entirely understood), which was consequently left out of the IPCC’s calculations for the Fourth Assessment Report. Rather than risk uncertainly and disagreement over how sea level would rise, the IPCC omitted the failure of the ice sheets and relegated it to a footnote. (Yusoff, 2009: 1011– 1012, italics added)

Drawing on Bataille and Blanchot, Yusoff articulates the problem of “nonknowledge [being] that part of human experience that is excluded or expelled, because it is seen not to contribute to knowledge, even though it is experienced and is thus the most intimate form of knowledge” (2009: 1014). She therefore queries how we can “respond to unknowing within knowledge in a way that does not simply restate the limited terms of engagement that continue to disregard this excess” (2009: 1015).



Projecting Sea Level Rise

77

Focus on the aesthetics of scientific visualizations and not merely their content, may be productive, she suggests: At the point at which data become image, and thus regimes of colour, light, and density, the accumulative force of data become fluvial, in the sense that it washes away the possibility of the atomisation of thought – information is inhabited as experience or as “matter-emotion” (Blanchot, 1995b, page 108) … In short, the animated world that we know is reanimated through visualisation models … Placing the catastrophic “visions of the world” generated by digital earth into an aesthetic and philosophical space of consideration (they are of course already there), we can say that they exhibit an exorbitant potential, pushing conventional conditions of observing to the limit. (2009: 1021)

If “[f]or Bataille the project of recognising excess within economies is part of an uneasy form of vital recuperation that allows us to understand rather than undergo destruction” (2009: 1024), then excessive visions with their exorbitant potential may contribute understanding, Yusoff is convinced. Embracing this film’s exorbitant potential, we might say that An Inconvenient Truth’s animations particularly, along with other research generated visualizations, contribute to our understanding of climate change not simply to the extent that they purport scientific accuracy, but also because – in their excess – they escape the boundaries of the known and the knowable. If in climateGEM, information specific to Puluwat is lacking, still there are frighteningly blatant rectangular red boxes denoting what would be under water should the seas rise over areas of the high islands in the state of Chuuk (Figure 3.8). With flood.firetree, the effects of sea level rise on Puluwat are evident. At each of the different projected elevations, the atoll becomes progressively inundated (Figure  3.9). Also, Yap, the possible destination island,

Figure 3.8  Representing inundation through climateGEM’s web map visualization tool. Created by Jeremy Weiss and used with permission. See http://www.geo.arizona.edu/dgesl/ research/other/climateGEM/climateGEM.htm.

78

Janet Walker

Figure 3.9  Toggling up the sea height in firetree.net.



Projecting Sea Level Rise

79

would see significant inundation. These various colorful and/or fluvial visualizations are affective; differently affective than on-site subject interviews such as the one with Francis of Lamotrek, but affective nevertheless. How might a person from an endangered area experience this interactive mapping tool? I checked climateGEM for my own locale. At four meters of sea height an ominous red rectangle appears over my workplace, the coastal campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara (Figure 3.10). However, we were relieved to learn from the author of a sea level rise vulnerability study of our area and from our campus architect that the campus is both prepared and fortunate in its bluff-top location, in contradistinction to the city’s airport.24

Navigating the Future Who will be obliged to uproot, with what support, how will this be decided, where will they/we go, and how will they/we be received? While intergovernmental planning has focused – with insufficient results – on climate change mitigation,25 the navigational technologies I have analyzed in this chapter variously and knowledgeably communicate the vagaries of coastal space and the profound uncertainties and painful contingencies of moving to higher ground. Documentary films and other screen media figuring sea level rise are hugely important, therefore, not relative to their omniscience, but as a way of raising further debate and resources.26 People from small, low-lying Pacific islands already exceed Someplace with a Mountain’s characterization of current residents as “traditionals,” in part through their openness to an array of possibilities. As Vid Raatior and Chief

Figure 3.10  Another potentially impacted Pacific community, using climateGEM imagery. Created by Jeremy Weiss and used with permission. Rectangular outline added. See http:// www.geo.arizona.edu/dgesl/research/other/climateGEM/climateGEM.htm.

80

Janet Walker

John Uruo counsel,27 all good options for the Puluwatese and other inhabitants of threatened islands should be explored, including those that might necessitate a change in the islanders’ daily practices. The Puluwatese may well choose, under dire circumstances, to shift their venue while doing their best to sustain their “ways.” We in the West have much to learn from them.28 Here in Santa Barbara there was a volunteer education effort to paint a “blue line” on the city streets to remind people “that the coastline is an outcome of collective human efforts.” Inspired by An Inconvenient Truth, this line, estimated at 7 meters to reflect sea level rise in the event of the melting of the Greenland ice cap, would have cut inland “right up into the heart of the city.” After protracted efforts to gain the proper permits for the painted line, the physical plan was sunk by real estate and other interests. But the project continues online (lightblueline.org), perhaps reminding us of the connectedness of Californians with South Pacific islanders across the ocean, and for that matter, of the oceanic medium that sustains us all across the vast sea of islands that is our planet earth. Daniel Sui suggests that “[b]y integrating tools with creative imaginations, we can ask more innovative and socially relevant questions about the evolving character of the Earth’s surface under conditions of global environmental change” (2004: 63). This chapter has been an exploration of specific ways that “tools with creative imaginations” participate in a circuit of understanding and feeling. Each of the mobile media forms discussed – whether realized at a computer interface or in the physical realm, as when a laptop is transported by sailboat across the open sea – is intricately constructed, rhetorically multiple, and epistemologically uncertain. Such are the complexities we must continue to probe if we are to understand figurations of sea level rise, and how our next steps in the coastal zone might be further imaged, imagined, and directed along a path of self-determination and social justice.

Notes 1 This chapter is related to my book-in-progress about media, geography, and environment. As a humanities scholar delving into navigational technologies pertaining to an area of the world from which I do not hail, I am particularly cognizant of the debt owed to the many knowledgeable people who were willing to share their expertise with me. In particular I would like to thank Steve Goodall, Candace Schermerhorn, Flora Furlong, Vid Raatior, Bruce Caron, Eckart Meiburg, Michael Goodchild, Lisa Parks, members of the UC Santa Barbara Environmental Media Initiative Research Group, and Don Janelle and the participants in the UC Center for Spatial Studies ThinkSpatial group. I am also grateful for astute and encouraging editorial comments from Juan Francisco Salazar, Alex Juhasz, and Alisa Lebow. 2 Sea height does not rise uniformly like a bathtub ring around the globe. Although average or mean rise is discussed and attempts are made to quantify it, regional differences in sea level rise attributable to wind patterns, ocean currents, vertical land adjustments, and all manner of anthropogenic factors are significant. See Lemonick (2010), Church (2001), Bromirski et al. (2012).



Projecting Sea Level Rise

81

3 See Connolly and Anderson (1987) and their film First Contact (1983), MacCannell (1994), Clifford and Marcus (1986), Taylor (1994), and Rony (1996) for critical discussions of the  colonialist impulses of traditional anthropology and the disparate results of contact including “first contact,” or the initial meeting between Westerners and indigenous peoples. 4 Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds (1963) exemplifies the ethnographic mode that does not include subject interviews. 5 I am relying on Carol Farbotko’s identification of the photographer as Mark Lynas. The film itself lists Lynas in the credits, but does not identify the photos’ sources where they appear in the film. 6 Documentaries about sea level rise are proliferating and their existence and variety is a rich and vital topic for analysis. Although this chapter is focused on Someplace with a Mountain and An Inconvenient Truth, I do want to acknowledge other current documentary films about the effects of sea level rise on low-lying islands. Among them are Michael Nash’s Climate Refugees (2009), Jon Shenk’s The Island President (2011), Tom Zubrycki’s The Hungry Tide (2011), and Jennifer Redfearn’s Academy Award-nominated documentary, Sun Come Up: The Story of Climate Change Refugees (2011). The website for “Water Is Rising,” a Pacific islander performance project, http://www.waterisrising. com/content/films, accessed July 20, 2014, lists a dozen relevant films, many of which are available on the site as streaming video. 7 As Bodenhamer et al. indicate, “the discipline … [of] … geography found itself divided over the technology in ways that mimicked the concerns expressed by humanists about quantitative methods generally. The central issue was, at heart, epistemological: GIS privileged a certain way of knowing the world, one that valued authority, definition, and certainty over complexity, ambiguity, multiplicity, and contingency, the very things that engaged humanists. From this internal debate, often termed Critical GIS, came a new approach, GIS and Society, which sought to reposition GIS as GIScience, embodying it with a theoretical framework that it previously lacked” (Bodenhamer et al., 2010: ix). Geographers have been for some time “re-examining cartographic conventions and seeking ways to represent uncertainty and ambiguity, subjectivity and agency” (Rumsey, 2009: 4). Attending specifically to methods of geovisualization, Sarah Elwood clarifies that what defines approaches to qualitative geovisualization “is not the absence of numeracy. Rather, it is their integration of multiple modes of representation – visual, textual, numerical – and iterative interpretive analysis of these representations to tease out what they reveal about social and material situations” (Elwood, 2010: 403). 8 The software company ESRI defines a Geographic Information System as one that “integrates hardware, software, and data for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information.” 9 Yoosun Park and Joshua Miller (2006) have written compellingly about the suffering of poor New Orleanians whose homes in low-lying and other environmentally undesirable areas of the city sustained greater damages and in much greater proportion from Hurricane Katrina than those of wealthier residents in more desirable, higher elevation neighborhoods. 10 It is not clear from the film itself to what extent the islanders collude with Goodall to “perform,” in the way that Dean MacCannell (1994) has described, a “primitivity” that is no longer theirs. 11 There is an ongoing debate in the literature on climate change induced migration about whether those forced to move should be called climate migrants or climate “refugees.”

82

12

13 14

15

16 17

18 19

20

21

Janet Walker The latter term is thought by some to make the people and their plight legible and deserving of consideration within policy discourses. Others dispute the label as one that undermines the perceived identities, rights, and agency of people at the greatest risk of being made landless. See McNamara and Gibson (2009) and Biermann and Boas (2010). Steve Goodall has let me know via email that the shot is actually of one of the small outer atolls of Lamotrek (7° 27' 30.06"N 146° 22' 27.62" E). While perhaps not problematic in  and of itself, the substitution for Puluwat is part of a broader conflation to be ­discussed below. There is also a dearth of labels programmed into Google Earth for the area, especially in comparison with the large number appearing for the continental United States. Also when he talks about the film project, as I have heard him do on four occasions, Goodall consistently states that it is the Puluwatese, in particular, he seeks to help. The four occasions were at the 2010 Santa Barbara International Film Festival, to students in my course on Films of the Natural and Human Environment in the fall of 2011, and ­during two meetings of UC Santa Barbara’s Environmental Media Initiative Research Group of the Carsey-Wolf Center in November 2011. Goodall is resolved that the decision whether to relocate from Puluwat is for the Puluwatese themselves to make. That said, a documentary scholar will know that the actions of documentary subjects are never wholly independent of the production process. The participants were a core group of the members of the Environmental Media Initiative Research Group of the Carsey-Wolf Center on the University of Santa Barbara campus. See http://www.carseywolf.ucsb.edu/emi, accessed July 20, 2014. Land elevation and sea surface measurements may be achieved through the high resolution imaging instruments LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging, looking downward from airplanes and satellites) and ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, flying on the Terra satellite). These would include predictions of land-based ice melt and calculations of the earth’s gravitational pull, termed “glacial forebulge” (where the earth is pooched up by glacial movement). See also n. 2. Michael Goodchild mentioned this point in his October 4, 2011 talk, “Geographical Intelligence,” for the ThinkSpatial forum of the Center for Spatial Studies at UC Santa Barbara, http://spatial.ucsb.edu/events/thinkspatial-brownbags/brownbags-2011-2012/, accessed July 20, 2014. See also Longley et al. (2011). The project is entitled DINAS-COAST, which stands for Dynamic and Interactive Assessment of National, Regional and Global Vulnerability of Coastal Zones to Climate Change and Sea-Level Rise. The goal is to establish a user-friendly, cross-disciplinary database for coastal modeling and vulnerability assessment taking into account “(i) the geomorphic structure of the coastal environment; (ii) the potential for wetland migration; (iii) the locations of major rivers and deltas; (iv) population density classes; and (v) administrative boundaries” (Vafeidis et al., 2004: 803). The NOAA tool is the “Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding Impacts Viewer” provided by the Digital Coast project of the Coastal Services Center, http://www.csc.noaa.gov/ digitalcoast/tools/slrviewer/, accessed July 20, 2014. The University of Arizona “web map visualization tool,” climateGEM, has been created under the Geospatial Environmental Modeling of Climatic Hazards and Their Impacts project of the Department of  Geosciences and Environmental Studies Laboratory, http://climategem.geo.arizona.



22 23

24

25

26 27 28

Projecting Sea Level Rise

83

edu/slr/world/index.html, accessed July 20, 2014. There is also the Google Earth hack by Alex Tingle, http://flood.firetree.net, accessed July 20, 2014, which uses NASA data. Google Earth has its own interactive sea level rise modeling layer in a section of the web application under “terrain.” But I decided to discontinue prioritization of Google Earth at this point in the chapter. Parks (2010) is critical of the “Crisis in Darfur” layer of Google Earth because although it intends a productive crisis mapping, it nevertheless reverts to unproductive stereotypes of Africa and Africans and pretends a fullness of information that it actually lacks. For research on crisis mapping see Liu and Palen (2010) and Meier (2010). The session at which this information was presented, entitled “Santa Barbara Geographies: Past, Present, and as the Sea Levels Rise” (November 9, 2012), was part of the 2012–2013 “Figuring Sea Level Rise” series of our campus’s Critical Issues in America program. The speakers being referenced here are Gary Griggs and Marc Fisher. The third speaker was Edward Keller. See http://criticalissues.ucsb.edu, accessed July 20, 2014. The Kyoto Protocol with its binding targets for the reduction of greenhouse gases is an intergovernmental attempt at mitigation. The Protocol has been signed and ratified by 192 parties. Canada withdrew. The US is the only signatory that has not ratified the agreement. The recent Sun Come Up (Redfearn, 2011) is notable for showing Carteret islanders themselves attempting to arrange for the migration of an initial cluster of families to Bougainville, the main island of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. Chief Uruo visited our UC Santa Barbara campus on January 25, 2012. Also, a group calling themselves The Pacific Voyagers are sailing across the Pacific to raise awareness about “our Ocean in peril.”

References Barnett, J. and Campbell, J. (2010) Climate Change and Small Island States: Power, Knowledge and the South Pacific. London: Earthscan. Biermann, F. and Boas, I. (2010) Preparing for a Warmer World: Towards a Global Governance System to Protect Climate Refugees. Global Environmental Politics, 10(1), 60–68. Blanchot, M. (1995) The Work of Fire, trans. C. Mandell. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Bodenhamer, D.J., Corrigan, J., and Harris, T.M. (eds.) (2010) The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bromirski, P.D., Miller, A.J., and Flick, R.E. (2012) Understanding North Pacific Sea Level Rise Trends. EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, 93(27), 249–256. Bruno, G. (2002) Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. New York: Verso. Cameron, F.R. (2011) Saving the “Disappearing Islands”: Climate Change Governance, Pacific Island States and Cosmopolitan Dispositions. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 25(6), 873–886. Church, J.A. (2001) How Fast are Sea Levels Rising? Science, 294 (October 26), 802–803. Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.E. (eds.) (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Connolly, B. and Anderson, R. (1987) First Contact: New Guinea’s Highlanders Encounter the Outside World. New York: Viking.

84

Janet Walker

Cope, M. and Elwood, S. (eds.) (2009) Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach. Los Angeles and London: Sage. Dear, M., Ketchum, J., Luria, S., and Richardson, D. (eds.) (2011) GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place. London and New York: Routledge. Elwood, S. (2010) Geographic Information Science: Visualization, Visual Methods, and the Geoweb. Progress in Human Geography, 35(3), 401–408. Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Farbotko, C. (2010) Wishful Sinking: Disappearing Islands, Climate Refugees and Cosmopolitan Experimentation. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 51(1), 47–60. Farbotko, C. and McGregor, H.V. (2010) Copenhagen, Climate Science and the Emotional Geographies of Climate Change. Australian Geographer, 41(2), 159–166. Gregory, D. (1993) Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Gregory, I.N. and Ell, P.S. (2007) Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies and Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, T.M., Corrigan, J., and Bodenhamer, D.J. (2010) Challenges for the Spatial Humanities: Toward a Research Agenda. In Bodenhamer, D.J., Corrigan, J., and Harris, T.M. (eds.) (2010) The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hau’ofa, E. (1993) Our Sea of Islands. In Waddell, E., Naidu, V., and Hau’ofa, E. (eds.) A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, pp. 2–16. Suva: School of Social and Economic Development, University of the South Pacific and Beake House. Lemonick, M.D. (2010) The Secret of Sea Level Rise: It Will Vary Greatly by Region. Yale Environment 360 (March 22), http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2255, accessed July 21, 2014. Levinson, M., Ward, R.G., and Webb, J.W. (1973) The Settlement of Polynesia: A Computer Simulation. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Liu, S. and Palen, L. (2010 The New Cartographers: Crisis Map Mashups and the Emergence of Neogeographic Practice. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems, 37, 69–90. Longley, P.A., Goodchild, M.F., Maguire, D.J., and Rhind, D.W. (2011) Geographic Information Systems and Science, 3rd edn. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. MacCannell, D. (1994) Cannibal Tours. In Taylor, L. (ed.) Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994. New York and London: Routledge. McNamara, K.E. and Gibson, C. (2009) “We Do Not Want to Leave Our Land”: Pacific Ambassadors at the United Nations Resist the Category of “Climate Refugees.” Geoforum, 40, 475–483. Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Meier, P. (2010) The Rise of Crisis Mapping and the Crisis Mappers Group. iRevolution (March 28), http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/rise-of-crisismappers, accessed July 21, 2014. Nichols, B. (1991) Representing Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nicholls, R.J. and Cazenave, A. (2010) Sea-level Rise and Its Impact on Coastal Zones. Science, 328, 1517–1520. Park, Y. and Miller, J. (2006) The Social Ecology of Hurricane Katrina. Smith College Studies in Social Work, 76(3), 9–24. Parks, L. (2004) Kinetic Screens: Epistemologies of Movement at the Interface. In Couldry, N. and McCarthy, A. (eds.) MediaSpace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age, pp. 37–57. London and New York: Routledge.



Projecting Sea Level Rise

85

Parks, L. (2010) Between Orbit and the Ground: Conflict Monitoring, Google Earth and the “Crisis in Darfur” Project. In Sarkar, B. and Walker, J. (eds.) Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering, pp. 245–267. London and New York: Routledge. Renov, M. (1993) Introduction: The Truth About Non-Fiction. In M. Renov (ed.) Theorizing Documentary, pp. 1–11. New York and London: Routledge. Rony, F.T. (1996) The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rumsey, A.S. (2009) Spatial Technologies and the Humanities. Scholarly Communication Institute 7 Report, University of Virginia, http://uvasci.digress.it/, accessed August 15, 2014. Smith, N. (2008) Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space, 3rd edn. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Solomon, S. et al. (eds.) (2007) Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, Contribution of Working Group 1 to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sui, D.Z. (2004) GIS, Cartography, and the “Third Culture”: Geographic Imaginations in the Computer Age. The Professional Geographer, 56(1), 62–72. Taylor, L. (ed.) (1994) Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994. New York and London: Routledge. Vafeidis, A.T., Nicholls, R.J., McFadden, L., Hinkel, J., and Grashoff, P.S. (2004) Developing a Global Database for Coastal Vulnerability Analysis: Design Issues and Challenges. The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 34, Part XXX, 801–805. von Lünen, A. and Moschek, W. (2011) Without Limits: Ancient History and GIS. In Dear, M., Ketchum, J., Luria, S., and Richardson, D. (eds.) (2011) GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place. London and New York: Routledge. Yusoff, K. (2009) Excess, Catastrophe, and Climate Change. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27, 1010–1029.

Part II

Migration

Introduction Migration

Anikó Imre

Migration refers to a range of experiences that entail the movement of people from one region to another, whether via immigration through exile and diaspora to human trafficking, migrant labor or other displacements due to external economic, political, and environmental forces. Together, the three chapters in this section examine projects that encompass most kinds of human movement usually identified as migratory, across a range of locations that span the globe. Even though the forms and places of migration examined by the authors are diverse, shared conclusions emerge from the chapters about the relationship between the movement of people and the moving image, particularly as it is employed in documentary approaches. First of all, given the current prominence of “migration” in politics, scholarship, and filmmaking alike, we tend to think of it as a particularly contemporary problem. All three authors explain how processes of globalization in late capitalism have eroded borders among nation-states and uprooted large numbers of people or forced them to shift locations in search of work, livable political conditions, or even, simply food and water. At the same time, it is also clear from these contributions that the mass movement of people, along with that of goods and images, has considerably intensified in the era of globalization, even as it clearly has deep historical roots. Foregrounding the continuities between colonial and contemporary patterns of migration helps to demystify the abrupt clash with otherness with which migration across state borders is often associated. Leshu Torchin draws up an historical lineage of filmic engagements with human trafficking that goes back to the early twentieth century, when the acceleration of the speed of information and mass migration inspired an entire cycle of films, stage dramas, and novels about white slavery in Europe and North America. In a similar A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

90

Anikó Imre

vein, both Mieke Bal and Ursula Biemann acknowledge in their reflections on their own documentary work that current migration flows map onto layers of historical patterns. In discussing her own “experimental documentaries” that focus on various migratory experiences, Bal emphasizes that such experiences are nothing new. What distinguishes contemporary documentary-making from earlier approaches to migration is the imperative to foreground the affective, relational politics that permeates relations among migrants, the documentary filmmaker, and the audience. Biemann’s “videogeography” Sahara Chronicle (2006–2009) documents how older – colonial and even tribal – migration paths within Africa have been altered by much more recent European Union policies. Since the 1990s, the Schengen Agreement has eliminated borders within the EU, while it outsourced the border patrolling and surveillance of Sub-Saharan migration areas to the Maghreb states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. In effect, Biemann’s video research testifies, European mobility has increased at the expense of Sub-Saharan mobility. Biemann also documents how older, local micro-alliances have been mobilized to resist these new international border regimes. Second, while the three chapters focus on migration as a series of phenomena that have accrued overwhelmingly negative connotations, they also emphasize that the encounters it stages with difference and hybridity offer opportunities for reframing migration in a positive light. Mieke Bal reflects on her own impulse to make experimental documentary videos and installations about migrants to create meeting points between the migrants and viewers, who are always already unwitting participants in migration. Her work promotes “migratory aesthetics,” an aesthetic of geographical mobility that reaches beyond a nation-state organized around a uniform culture that usually privileges a single dominant language. Migratory aesthetics yields videos that admit to their own performativity. As Bal puts it, “They establish connections with people who are immersed in migratory culture but do not necessarily take critical distance from their own position in it. They are made in close collaboration with their ‘subjects’ and deploy aesthetic experimentation in order to get closer to a shared understanding.” Ursula Biemann, a documentary artist-theorist who has long been uncovering and visualizing geopolitical lines of migration and mobility across the globe, discusses two of her recent videos, Sahara Chronicle and Contained Mobility (2004) in her contribution. She explains that she uses the video camera as a cognitive tool to write counter-geographies, which, rather than reinforcing regimes of border control, document the ways in which people subvert and transgress borders. Similar to Bal’s “migratory aesthetics,” Biemann’s documentary aesthetic reproduces the experiences of the migrants themselves. It refuses the idea of immutable borders that separate countries, isolate the filmmaker from her subjects and her audiences, and erect boundaries among genres, disciplines, and methods. Biemann points to the video essay as the only appropriate form in which to do proper justice to the  movement of people. Her films adopt a non-linear narrative structure and a subjective logic that embraces discontinuities and even contradictions. Ironically, as she shows, such a disjunctive logic actually produced the most complete and reliable

Introduction 91 existing record of the complicated immigration case of Anatol, the migrant subject at the center of Contained Mobility. Leshu Torchin’s panoramic investigation of human trafficking in film also makes it clear that a variety of filmic genres, approaches, and aesthetics, along with policy, economic, and sociological discourses, share the stakes in understanding the logic and motivations for moving bodies across borders, which include sex tourism, human trafficking, mail order brides, slavery, domestic service, and migrant labor. Such films, she explains, visualize the permeability of borders within contemporary globalization. This allows flows of people to move along with flows of finance, labor, and technologies within hybrid economies that mix formal, informal, and criminal elements. Finally, all three chapters connect migration as an urgent political-economic issue with migration as a theoretical issue that involves serious ethical decisions concerning the aesthetics of moving images. The three authors set out not only to understand but also to actively transform the relationship between the moving image and the movement of people, in three different ways: Torchin gives a complex overview of trafficking in non-fiction media forms. As her intervention shows, these representations reveal underground operations criminalized by nation-states but also those committed with the complicity of state and supra-state organizations. This leaves little choice for people stuck in the exploitative conditions of economic globalization other than to move in and out of criminality. Biemann and Bal more explicitly foreground their own personal ethical and affective transformations as scholar-practitioners involved in documenting migration. Biemann observes the micro-politics of place by establishing close connections with people on the ground, whether they are prostitutes, political refugees, or border patrollers. She is also highly aware of the virtual lives of contemporary documentaries and their immense potential for manipulation – another reason for shifting the emphasis from disengaged documentation to the work’s performative, relational dimension. Mieke Bal, a theorist and visual artist, calls her own ongoing self-reflective practice “autotheory,” an understanding of the practice of art making as a form of thinking, and the reflection on the film as a continuation of the making. She explains that she first picked up a video camera in order to connect with people in ways that transgress the limits of traditional writing. At the same time, she also wants to break the loneliness of the migrant not so much to offer a condescending “voice” but to build a ground of empathy based on a shared participation in migratory culture. Herein is perhaps the most important lesson to draw from the following chapters: Migration is not simply a problem caused by migrants to the settled majority, as campaign slogans would have it. As Bal states and the two other chapters underscore, the entire public space in which we live is migratory, whether someone is a migrant oneself or not. It is a sensual, affective, and ethical experience of constant encounters with otherness that requires ongoing cultural translation. Only such a cultural translation can challenge inherently hierarchical linguistic, cultural, and political borders and foster a “move toward the other,” in Bal’s formulation, which is the main goal of contemporary documentary-making.

4

Videogeographies Ursula Biemann

Migration is a form of geographic practice. Particular to a geographic approach to image-making with respect to migration is that the focus is no longer on the formation of dislocated subjectivities and shifts in identities that are brought forth by globalization processes, but on the places themselves, on the transformation of space. In my video and artistic practice I have pursued the question of how human routes inscribe themselves materially into the terrain and form particular cultural and social landscapes. Geography, rather than implying an apolitical world description, is understood here as a signifying system in which the subject is thought of in connection with place and notions of belonging, borders, transgression, and movement. Geography here is a cultural practice, a symbolic way of redesigning space. This text will introduce two of my own video works that pursue my ongoing interest in the transformation of space due to the movement and displacement of people. Contained Mobility (2004), a rather technological piece, traces the restless biography of an illegal migrant through Europe, and Sahara Chronicle (2006–2009) is a substantial video research on the clandestine migration systems in the Sahara. Like most of my videos, they explore how migration paths and travel routes, not only those of people but also those of capital, resources, and visual data, have formed particular cultural and social landscapes. My practice consists in going into these spaces and videographing the micro-politics of local people. In my own way, I’m using the video camera as a cognitive tool to write counter-geographies, geographies that do not affirm and reinforce control regimes of borders and mobility, but on the contrary, that document the ways in which people subvert and transgress borders and other obstacles that have been imposed on them. A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Videogeographies 93

Going to the Border First, I should say something about how my research-oriented art practice addresses, from the onset, geopolitical issues. My videos and writings since the late 1990s chronicle two parallel processes: first, the process of discerning a political and geographical area of interest for my art practice (e.g., the gendered, international labor division along the Mexican border) and, second, the process of tracing out a research field at the juncture of different forms of knowledge production where this practice could be situated. At the time when I began video-making in the late 1990s, art discourses were irrevocably “contaminated” by other theoretical currents such as cultural and media studies, ethnography, urbanism, post-colonial criticism, and feminist theories, and a rigorous re-evaluation of one’s position was on the agenda. For these currents not only brought new contents but also provided instruments for reformulating the domain of aesthetic production. My simultaneous engagements with the profound transformations that have been induced by globalization on all levels of society, and with the form in which these could be addressed in the expanded aesthetic field, are conceptually related. The deregulation of an entrenched world order inevitably troubled the categories and methodologies through which this order has been established and maintained. The new protocol emerging from the major political and social reorganization on a global scale is the unfettered transgression of boundaries not only between nations, but also between genres and disciplines. These two ongoing processes – with parallel effects on geography and knowledge regimes – are connected and hinge, in my work, on the concept of the border. The proliferation of academic and artistic work on border issues witnessed the beginning of geography turning into a major frame of reference and organizing system for these contents, way outside the practice of geography. Many artists expressed a certain fascination with reinforced border regimes that emerged first along the US-Mexico border, and later along the eastern and southern borders of the European Union. From the beginning, I have been somewhat skeptical of the

Figure 4.1  Video still from Contained Mobility (Ursula Biemann, 2004).

94

Ursula Biemann

usefulness of documenting border fences and impressive surveillance technologies. It seems to me that even from a critical perspective, the focus on the line and its militarization cannot help but reproduce and reinforce the divisive force of the border as a concept. While my earlier videos like Performing the Border (1999) or Europlex (2003) focused on actual border locations, as for instance the Mexican border town Ciudad Juárez or the Spanish enclave on Moroccan territory, I later turned to looser, more invisible and virtual notions of borders.

Post-Humanist Space Contained Mobility enters the digital world generated by the prevailing control of mobility and the unstable, translocal forms of life that emerge between and around it. The video conveys this paradoxical, but fully interconnected, contemporary condition by splitting itself onto two synchronized screens. One screen displays digital navigation and container traffic information systems while the other registers the interior of a container inhabited by an asylum seeker, Anatol. In conversation, Imre Szeman observes that, among my videos, Contained Mobility offers possibly the most direct, forceful and engaged examinations of the ways in which subjects are today enmeshed in a web of legal, geographic, political, and economic systems which shape and determine belonging – one of the fundamental aspects of being human. The experience of globalization connects the question of what it means to be human with the technologies by which the human is divided, organized, distributed, arranged, prohibited, emplaced, and displaced (Biemann and Szeman, 2007). The story of the biologist and refugee, Anatol K. Zimmermann, narrates reality in the state of exception. A Belorussian, born in a labor detention camp in the Gulag, he has lived in limbo for an indefinite time, suspended in a post-national lapse. As a young adult, back in White Russia, he was discriminated against for being ethnic German and persecuted by the authoritarian state for being a dissident. His is the experience of “low-intensity citizenship,” a citizenship not fully benefiting from human or citizen rights. It is not surprising that such second-class citizens, who have historically been granted lesser rights, tend to be those most affected by neoliberalism’s trend for diminishing citizens’ rights. They are the ones we are most likely to encounter in an ever-growing juridical and spatial reality in Europe and worldwide. The crisis of human rights is inextricably linked to the crisis of the nation-state, which is based on the notion of citizenship and is thus incapable of bearing meaningful relations to those who live outside of it. Anatol’s existence takes place in a state of exception, in the cracks between the simple binary of renationalization and repatriation. For many migrants, it has become virtually impossible to enter the European space in a legally sanctioned way. The stringent measures devised for Schengen are being further reinforced in a post-9/11 period, and only the very resourceful and inventive stand a chance of overcoming the imposed barriers.1 Even though many

Videogeographies 95 migrants would rather choose other venues, they recognize that asylum is the only option left for entry. In theory, the European countries guaranteed the human right for asylum when signing the Geneva Conventions in 1949, which constitute some of the basic conventions of a humanist culture. De facto, however, nation-states implement legal and practical measures that make it virtually impossible to access this right. One way of achieving this inaccessibility is by keeping migrants in extraterritorial transit zones, where national constitutions do not apply and cannot therefore be violated. Prolonged states of legal suspension are increasingly experienced by people who are not entitled to settle down anywhere. What used to be a state of exception has slowly consolidated into the primary mode of migratory subsistence. The provisional state – the reception camp, the asylum procedure – has turned into a permanent post-humanist condition. Contained Mobility attempts to grasp this transformative moment, to understand the qualities that characterize the emerging transitory subject and to bring this condition to the fore. Since the mid 1990s, Anatol has been working in Poland and attempting to enter the European Union, first by swimming over the freezing river Neisse to Germany, and later by crossing mountains and swamps in Hungary, Slovenia, and elsewhere. In the video, he appears as a highly educated, smartly dressed human being who cunningly uses technology to find loopholes in the system of Schengenland. While webcam images show Anatol in a shipping container, the factual narrative of his odyssey of illegal border crossings, his capture, internment, and escape scrolls up the screen. The figure of Anatol comes to signify the itinerant body, never reaching a final destination. Translocal existence appears here as an extrajudicial movement from place to place. The gaze into the inside of the container, perceived through a surveillance camera, evokes a collapse of the borders between public and private life. This camera lens captures a refugee, an irregular migrant, an exile, the border that is effacing that between human being and citizen, the line between life and law. And it is also the possible point of departure for the conception of a new post-national subject, a subject outside of political representation, where “everything new is born illegal” as the last line in the video reads. Contained Mobility juxtaposes two spatial realities of the global container transport system and human migration contained as pure movement. There is on the one hand a global network that aims to control the flow of commodities and people on a global scale, regulating the major nodes and logistical centers of harbors and airports. On the other hand, equally inventive tactics of evasion by people question the prerogative of access to a political community. The synchronized videos give some insight into the ongoing struggle between disciplinary mobility and the desire for self-determination, keeping in mind, however, that migratory resistance does not necessarily define itself in opposition to a specific power but imprints itself through all sorts of deviant tactics of survival and empowerment. In this scheme, the shipping container is used as a symbol for these contradictory terms as it denotes a quality of confinement and enclosure, while simultaneously implying a systematized worldwide mobility.

96

Ursula Biemann

Figure 4.2  Video still from Contained Mobility (Ursula Biemann, 2004).

Blind Spots and Withdrawals None of the images of Contained Mobility document reality. Every image is an artificial construct: a simulated seascape, a visual rendering of digital data, a webcam set up for a staged scene. The video is a conceptual statement about a particular state of being in this world. As the voice of the prologue reads: “To come ashore in an offshore place, in a container world that only tolerates the translocal state of not being of this place – nor of any other really – but of existing in a condition of permanent non-belonging, of juridical non-existence.” The condition of the refugee is expressed only in the negative. Documentary records often serve the interests of the state – to identify, to recognize, to know, to control. Accordingly, photography, positioned within ever-new and expanding surveillance systems, operates as judicial and forensic evidence. Control, however, is not absolute since every system has its blind spots. These become manifest when Anatol disappears from the screen as a result of the angle at which the picture is taken. Thus, blind spots become a metaphor for the system’s loopholes, which Anatol uses with great ease. At another moment, Anatol takes up a yoga position and, after a while, his figure dissolves in the air. The most obvious interpretation would be that he resorts to meditation in order to escape the confinement and precariousness of his situation. Perceiving things in a different, unreal way gives expression to a feeling of the stressful relationship and problematic sense of the self in relation to places. But there is also a deeper dimension to this image that I recognize in T.J. Demos’s question “How can one represent artistically a life severed from political representation?” In answer, he articulates – with reference to Yto Barrada’s photo series, A Life Full of Holes – that the scene visualizes the becoming of the refugee as a process that pulls away presence into another world, creating a hole in the visual field that expresses the phenomenon of dislocation as a rupture from the grasp of the state (Demos, 2006). The rupture from political status troubles representation. The subject withdraws somewhat from visual representability. While none of the video images are indexical, referring to an immediate lived reality, the text is strictly documentary. Based on several hours of interview with

Videogeographies 97 Anatol in his forever-temporary location in Liverpool, I extracted his complicated itinerant biography with the greatest possible accuracy. This is, in fact, the standard procedure required for every asylum application filed. Yet Anatol assured me that, after being processed by a dozen or so European countries, I was the first person to produce a complete record. Usually meant for the obscure circuits of asylum management (which mostly mean asylum denial), this information, which authorities no longer feel obliged to produce, is now made public through an artistic practice that produces the missing record required for access to the human right of asylum. This made me wonder whether the unexpected utility of my act of representation had an impact on its status as an artwork, signifying a contemporary human condition, or whether Contained Mobility had inadvertently turned into a document reporting on one case to be resolved. As dedicated as I am to symbolic production, I am nevertheless sensitive to the ethical question of when to put down the camera and assist the protagonist – in other words, whether direct intervention in social and political injustice is sometimes more justified than the aesthetic representation of it. In one instance, I did leave the mode of representation and engaged in a real-life encounter with Anatol: I offered to buy him a Polish passport. This was before Poland entered the EU, but it was only a matter of time and he would have been able to replace the forged passport with an EU one. As he was raised near the Polish border and spoke the language, this seemed to me the most suitable way for him to obtain the much-desired license to free circulation. Anatol declined. Salvation would have meant the death of his problem, which by now was obviously not only a burden but also the condition with which he has come to identify: to march in the cracks between nations as the postmigratory subject into which he has mutated.

Figure 4.3  Video still of Agadez Desert Truck, Sahara Chronicle (Ursula Biemann, 2006– 2009).

98

Ursula Biemann

Territories of Transit In the second project I would like to discuss here in some depth, I will take up the notion of geography introduced in the beginning of the text and develop it further into a social practice and organizing system. Sahara Chronicle (2006–2009) is a collection of videos on the modalities and orientations of migration across the Sahara; it chronicles the Sub-Saharan exodus towards Europe as a social practice embedded in local and historical conditions. The project introduces the migration system as an arrangement of pivotal sites, each of which have a particular function in the striving for migratory autonomy, as well as in the attempts made by diverse authorities to contain and manage these movements. Video documents include the transit migration hubs of Agadez and Arlit in Niger; Tuareg border guides in the Libyan desert; military patrols along the Algerian-Moroccan frontier in Oujda; the Mauritanian port of Nouadhibou on the border to the Polisario Front; and the deportation prison in Laayoune, Western Sahara. With its loose interconnectedness and its widespread geography, Sahara Chronicle mirrors the migration network itself. It does not intend to construct a homogeneous, overarching, contemporary narrative of a phenomenon that has long roots in colonial Africa and is extremely diverse and fragile in its present social organization and human experience. No authorial voice, or any other narrative device, is used to tie the carefully chosen scenes together; the full structure of the network comes together solely in the mind of the viewer who mentally draws connecting lines between the nodes at which migratory intensity is bundled. This text is not primarily intended to interpret these videos; rather, it is a place for making some further reflections about the politics of visual practice with regard to migration, with a particular emphasis on illegal migration. While migration in and from Africa is an integral part of the continent’s colonial history, globalization nevertheless brought some major changes. In the course of the 1990s, one European country after another joined the Schengen agreement, which aims to abolish the internal borders within continental Europe to create a single external border enforced by immigration checks. Predictably, the reinforced border regime had an immediate effect on migration flows from north Africa and, increasingly, from the deeper south of Sub-Saharan Africa; but it also did something more than that. New cooperation agreements delegated EU migration management of trans-Saharan movements to the Maghreb states (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya), outsourcing border control to countries where the free flow of people had been practiced for decades. Visa obligations for travelers entering the Maghreb from the south now rendered illegal the crossing into territory most people had hitherto considered their legitimate zone of mobility. The freedom to move within Europe is, therefore, achieved at the cost of free movement within Africa. According to Zygmunt Bauman, an unmistakable feature of the powerful is their elimination of obstacles to their own free movement, while limiting – through increased border controls – the mobility of others. Mobility would not be such a formidable power resource were it not complemented by the territorial fixity of the powerless

Videogeographies 99 (Bauman, 1998). It is good to keep in mind that, in the current reformulation of African-European relations, what is at stake is nothing less than the privileges and deprivations of the prime resource – mobility.

Imaging Clandestinity As part of the massive economic and political diaspora of our world of transnational capitalism, migrant workers uniquely embody the condition of cultural displacement and social discrimination. But, the task of a political aesthetics today is not to capture an image that best symbolizes our times; rather than positing the ultimate image, the task is to intervene effectively in current flows of representation, their narratives and framing devices. In some instances, the accepted story needs to be undone and we should not get anxious about reassembling it into another story too soon. The preferred mode of signification in Sahara Chronicle, therefore, is fragmentation and disassembly. The project contains an undefined number of videos, which are never shown all at once, since there is always something unknown, hidden, and incomplete about clandestine migration. My preferred way of showing them is in the form of an installation, whereby some videos are projected and others can be viewed on monitors, creating a multi-perspective audiovisual environment that can be inhabited by viewers, in much the same way that migration space is inhabited by the actors depicted.

Figure 4.4  Sahara Chronicle, installation at the Museum of Fine Arts Bern. Photo courtesy of Kunstsmuseum Bern.

100

Ursula Biemann

The Western news media has a very peculiar way of representing clandestine migration to Europe. It directs its spotlight on the boats packed with refugees, on the failure of the stranded migrants, celebrating police efforts to apprehend transgressors. Successful passages go undocumented. The media seems to succumb to every temptation of condensing reality into a symbol, thrusting the whole issue into discursive disrepair. In a perpetual loop, television clips capture the state of being intercepted, caught in a process of never reaching destination, a freeze frame of the Raft of the Medusa drifting off the shores of Senegal, fixed in an unending re-enactment of Géricault’s famous painting. In cinematographic language, this sort of freeze frame is simply called “a shot,” suggesting that the real is no longer represented but targeted. In the staccato of television news, this particular shot becomes the symbol that encapsulates the meaning of the entire drama. It is evident that complex social relations are not negotiated in this frantic but stabilizing manner. Apart from the time compression, which creates an immense discrepancy between representation and social reality, there is something seriously inadequate about this robotic viewpoint when it is directed at the shifting and precarious movements of life. But the mundane truth behind the trauma-like recurrence might be that these images are not the outcome of intense aesthetic reflection but the convenient product of current media politics under the strain of growing competition. Since their mission is to cover events rather than explain conditions, news channels do not see why they should send out expensive camera teams to remote desert towns in the Western Sahara or Niger, unless some drastic event makes these places internationally newsworthy. So we are likely to be presented with the lazy and less costly version of the story that only covers the most visible end points of a long journey. But there are more than practical explanations for this. The invisible operations – which effectively remain unknown to us thanks to these news strategies – contain another, perhaps quite unsettling, dimension of clandestine migration. Illegalized migration has become a shadowy, supplementary system, organizing a transitory moment in life. Many migrants completely break with older notions of place, coming to embody the kind of boundlessness that needs to be concealed and rigorously disavowed, for it has created an undesirable disorder in global civil society by pushing an immense liminal zone into a neatly mapped post-colonial order, halfway between the no longer defined worlds of colonizer and colonized. Through this unspeakable stateless movement, the clandestine traveler emerges only in the imagery of defense and segregation – identity cards, police frame-ups, prison mugshots, newspaper pictures of fugitives, CCTV monitors, and digital identification software – conveying the paradox of making a process visible while keeping it in the forbidden spectrum. Invisibility is, no doubt, an invaluable resource in the undercover transportation racket, which assumes a certain ambivalence in bringing a clandestine network to light. On the one hand, it obviously functions most effectively when it remains unknown; on the other hand, it illuminates the psychic dimension of the role that these “unruly others,” these “outlaws,” play in stabilizing the phantasmic civil norms that regulate mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. This subliminal dimension of

Videogeographies 101 the clandestine realm harbors a disturbing, but possibly productive, moment, if it can lead to a reconsideration of discriminating categories in civil society. When so many people are beyond, between, or on a waiting list for citizenship, there is a need to conceive of a different mode of dwelling in this world. Translocal existence brings to light this unfinished side of citizenship.

Evidence and Artifice Sahara Chronicle includes a number of records of the more or less successful efforts at keeping the fluctuating migration currents through Morocco, Mauritania, and Libya in check, by means ranging from off-road patrols in border terrain to aerial surveys by propeller planes and high-tech surveillance drones. Engaging with this politics of containment sucked me right into the gigantic visualizing apparatus and made me a part of it. One of the records that I shot followed the border brigades in the AlgerianMoroccan frontier-land, where they half-heartedly poke around popular hiding places for clandestinos near the train tracks. Nobody was found that day, but the colonel in charge of the area was pleased to demonstrate the efforts made by the royal brigades in impeding migration flows to Europe. As their budget is barely enough to cover one surveillance flight per week in the vast desert areas around border cities like Oujda or Laayoune, I didn’t want to initiate an extra flight for aerial filming that would risk the detection of a group of clandestine migrants hiding in the dunes. The police were willing to give me the photographs they had taken on previous tours; these pictures have a different status from the frames I would have shot from the same plane, functioning as evidence for use within the confidential circuits of police investigation. They capture the moment between recognition and possible disciplinary action. A simultaneous role as witness and record endows these images with a juridical effect, providing evidence of infringement and the occasion for judgment and deportation. Integrating these photographs in my artwork further contributes to the process of exposing the furtive act to the public, bringing it out into the open and positioning the viewer as both voyeur-witness and moral judge of the scene. However, the scrolling text in the video thwarts the fantasy of a potent vision, which has the power to evict, by introducing a thriving solidarity between the transiting migrants and the local populations. Moroccan carpenters have started to prefabricate boat kits, which can be quickly assembled by migrants in their desert hideouts. Distanced judgment is baffled here by a sense of local complicity. Another video is dedicated to some of the most high-tech surveillance technologies currently being deployed on military missions, from the war in Iraq to the Saharan desert front. Libya has received the newest models of unmanned airplanes from Germany, in return for their active demonstration of hindering migration flux to Europe. These drones glide over the desert borders, transmitting televisual data back to a remote receiver in real time. Other observation machines are equipped

102

Ursula Biemann

Figure 4.5  Video still of a Desert Radio Drone, Sahara Chronicle (Ursula Biemann, 2006–2009).

with night vision and thermal cameras, extending surveillance into realms invisible to the human eye. Colonel Muammar Kadhafi’s military department was not as cooperative as the Moroccan brigades in handing its visual intelligence to me, but we can safely assume that the images produced by these drones are no longer film-based photography like the ones used in Moroccan aerial reconnaissance. They are more likely to be computer generated, able to create visual imagery from recorded data, thus transposing things located outside the spectrum of visibility into a readable image. These technologies have created new ways in which an image can be linked to an actual object; the indexical linkage required in previous concepts of documentary realism has been traded for new methods of attaining and validating empirical knowledge beyond indexicality (Wolf, 1999). Aerial photography is inscribed in a different discourse than the images composed by optical devices onboard desert drones, since they stand for radically different interpretations of reality; the drone images are simulacra used as documentation. Lack of source material meant that I had to artificially construct it from highresolution satellite images of the Libyan desert. The soundtrack is composed of many layers of recordings from Saharan and Middle Eastern radio and TV stations, mixed with electronic sounds, music fragments, and winds. This artificial videography addresses the important fact that migratory space cannot simply be documented by conventional video-making on the ground. We need to enter the more ethereal strata of signal territories created by the streaming of images and the diffusion of sounds and information – territories with a relentless and excessive production of meaning. The abstraction of these images is offset in yet another video, with sequences of the hard reality experienced by those who have no visa to the borderless world of

Videogeographies 103

Figure 4.6  Video still of Deportation Prison Laayoune, Sahara Chronicle (Ursula Biemann, 2006–2009).

signs. The overcrowded deportation center in a former colonial prison in Laayoune, Western Sahara, offers a sight that propels you back 200 years into a somber past. Close your eyes and you can hear the chains jangle. The main light source is a barred skylight, a hole in the roof through which a harsh stream of sunlight pierces the sweaty gloom, making every mosquito and every grain of dust dance in front of your eyes. Slowly getting used to the scene, you see starvation, weakness, disease, and sun-scorched eyes; none of this matters when the goal is in sight, but it is excruciating to bear when hope has slid away. The only traces of the migrants’ trajectories are the fragile architectures they had built in the remote desert dunes during the days and weeks of holding out while water stocks were running low. The aerial photographs show that, around some of these shelters, an area is marked by stones like the outline of a garden or a place for prayer, as if the deadly expanse was a place too vast to comprehend.

A Network Run by a Transnational Tribe The core of Sahara Chronicle, however, is set in one of the truck terminals for desert crossing in Agadez (Biemann, 2006). The town, at the heart of Niger, is the southern gate to the Saharan basin for the main routes coming from West Africa; it is a major trans-Saharan trading center, and capital of the Tuareg. Saharan people live in open space, mobility is everything in this geography. They have developed different methods of mastering the terrain. By necessity, life is lean. And portable. Tuareg culture has worked out a system of information, a specific topographic literacy, with itineraries and means of communication. They are GPS embodied. In this

104

Ursula Biemann

environment, orientation makes all the difference between drifting and traveling, between fate and destination. In their minds, prosperity and power are located in movement rather than bounded territory. The video documents the great departure of the “Exodés,” those many young men and few young women from West Africa on a quest for a better life in the Maghreb, or, in a more distant, blurry vision, in Europe. In contrast to the images of failed arrival, these scenes show the moment of potentiality at which anything seems possible. The excitement about the risky outcome of their adventure is very tangible among the passengers. What unites them is the common goal of accessing the labor markets in the north. In joining this greater venture, they contribute to an elaborate system of information exchange, routing, and social organization that spans the immense Saharan region and, in doing so, creates a translocal space that will exist for as long as these social practices last. As a human network it is distinct from those facilitated by permanent material infrastructures, such as rails or fiberglass; it is a vibrant process of spatialization performed by the psychic dynamics of desire and anxiety – a web made of obstinacy and vulnerability. What we witness is a large-scale geographic reconfiguration, activated by growing practices of migration which are highly flexible and proficient at rerouting, reorganizing, and going covert in record time. It is in this guerilla fashion that the geography is made productive, by those players defined by global capitalist logic as immobilized: the poor and the deprived. The focus is on the unrepresented, rebellious, and obstinate local practices of space, which resist and circumvent any attempts to discipline them. If we want to understand what makes this emerging migration system work, one of the things we need to look at is the historic condition of the region. For it is the conceptual difference between nomadic and colonial politics of space that lies at the heart of the Sahara being turned once again into a contested zone of mobility. The immense Saharan territory of the Tuareg tribes was split in five by the Empires at the Berlin Conference in 1884. Since then, their space of mobility and livelihood has made up substantial areas of Algeria, Libya, Mali, Niger, and Chad. Denied a proper state, the Tuareg constitute a minority within these national cultures and are granted fewer civil rights than native citizens. Nonetheless, as a distinct linguistic and cultural entity, they maintain their identification as a people across the boundaries. Tuareg territorial structure is, by definition, transnational; it provides the framework for social and economic, if not political, organization. The role of these nomads is central to the transnational process of repurposing their old caravan routes as highways for illicit migration. Their unique topographical expertise and tribal ties are in high demand as a steady flow of Sub-Saharan migrants pass through Agadez and Arlit. The Tuareg rebellion in Niger in the mid 1990s, which made another attempt at consolidating the tribes into a nation-state, was directly linked to uranium mining in Arlit and the exclusion of the Tuareg from the wealth found on their territory. The revenue from uranium extraction was shared among the French owners and the Nigerien elite in the remote capital Niamey, who recruited miners from other ethnic

Videogeographies 105

Figure 4.7  Interview with former rebel leader Adawa, Sahara Chronicle (Ursula Biemann, 2006–2009).

groups from the south. The rebellion ended with a peace treaty, which promised better social integration. I interviewed former Tuareg rebel leader Adawa, who is the current head of the clandestine transportation operations in Arlit on the Algerian migration route. For lack of better opportunities, the returning former rebels saw a possibility of doing business with the transit migrants. Transportation services were needed; besides, Arlit, like Agadez, is a desert gate that can be controlled and taxed, but the desert border is a vast terrain and roving border patrols are few and far between. Some passengers were documented, many were not. Deploying rebel tactics, they swarm out in jeeps at night and bypass the border checkpoints with their full charge of migrants before melting into the dark dunes. The regional authority of Agadez saw the need to intervene in these opportunistic developments and formally mandated Adawa to manage the semi-legal transport of migrants in an organized fashion. The local authorities may have welcomed the fact that this locks him into a criminalized position, which compromises any further rebellious plans. Semi-legal, yet authorized, the business keeps the rebels pacified while generating extra income and power for the officials: a well-planned, if precarious, balance. This solves two problems at once: putting an experienced man in charge of logistics and keeping him occupied and accountable. Should Adawa ever prove to be uncooperative, the authorities can put him away without much ado. He understands that he has been taken hostage and that his status as a semi-citizen of Niger is directly linked to his guidance of more and more people into a terrain of bare survival in which citizenship is suspended. What these transit and border recordings aim at is not the consolidation of a national unity, as media reports on border defense inevitably attempt, but its

106

Ursula Biemann

opposite: the permeability and constant subversion of national space. To some extent, television reports on clandestine boat passengers do this too; yet, importantly, the shadowy and potentially subversive circumstances of such border passages are assimilated all too quickly into a disciplined national order in which the interventions of state officials play a leading part. Yet documenting reality today also means recognizing that the massive departures mark the beginning of a migratory existence for a great number of people whose lives will not integrate in a single space and whose interests will no longer be served by one nation-state. Images of clandestine migration networks and border passages allow for the cultivation of an alternative imaginary to national culture, one that is based on cultural practices that harness and play with national boundaries.

The Essayist Project Concluding, I would like to recall that what makes these videos a distinct geographic practice is their essayist form. The video essay typically has a non-linear narrative structure and follows a subjective logic that doesn’t shy away from loops and discontinuities. It could end at any point or continue beyond its end and it certainly doesn’t follow a particular line of argument that would assume a proposition, conclusion, or deduction. It is not conceived as a sequence in time but as constructed coexistence in space. Perhaps one of its most endearing qualities is that it allows for contradictions. Not unlike the transnational subjects of my research, the essay practices dislocation, it reaches across national boundaries and continents and ties together disparate places through a particular logic, arranging the material into a particular field of connections. In other words, the essayist approach is not about documenting realities but about organizing complexities. This very quality makes the audiovisual essay a suitable genre for my investigation of a subject matter like globalization. In this field of knowledge, many issues around economy, identity, spatiality, technology, and mobility converge and are placed in a complicated relationship to one another. The attempt to draw these layers together leads inevitably to the creation of an imaginary space, a sort of theoretical platform on which these reflections can take place and be in dialog with each other. In every work, essayists install this kind of space. We can think of it as an imaginary topography, on which all kinds of thoughts and events taking place in various sites and non-sites experience a spatial order (Biemann, 2003). Beyond being extremely suitable for my concerns, the essayist genre has directed my work continuously towards working in the human geographies of migration and global labor as visual-spatial configurations. The fact that this method does not confine my results to an objective logic has allowed me to integrate connections that seem unrelated, such as the encounter with prostitutes in the Turkish border town Trabzon in the context of a research on the Caspian oil geography, entitled Black Sea Files (2005). At first sight, there is no immediate causal relation between the massive capital flows generated by the westbound oil and the trafficking of women in the Black Sea basin, but their economies

Videogeographies 107 and trajectories are intricately connected through international visa agreements, reviving cultural affiliations and regional post-socialist histories. The technological adventure of pipeline building is juxtaposed here with the intimate experience of forced prostitution. These links are fragile but nevertheless very important if we want to convey the complexity and precariousness of contemporary human geographies. What interests me here and in all other conditions that I have investigated in and through my video-making is that a spatial perspective on migration harbors the great potential to make a move from the individual and experiential zoom on subjectivity formation to a wider structural and systemic understanding of migration. This is a field of investigation in which a great deal of visual experimentation has yet to occur.

Note 1 The reference here is to the 1985 Schengen Agreement, which introduced a Europeanwide common policy on the temporary entrance of persons to signatory nations. The countries in “Schengenland” include all members of the European Union (with the exception of Ireland and the United Kingdom) plus Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland.

References Bauman, Z. (1998) Space Wars: A Career Report. In Globalization: The Human Consequences, pp. 27–54. Cambridge: Polity Press. Biemann, U. (2003) Performing Borders: The Transnational Video. In Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age. Vienna: Springer Verlag GmbH. Biemann, U. (2006) Agadez Chronicle: Post-Colonial Politics of Space and Mobility in the Sahara. In Biemann, U. and Holmes, B. (eds.) The Maghreb Connection: Movements of Life Across North Africa, pp. 43–67. Barcelona: Actar. Biemann, U. and Szeman, I. (2007) Forced Transit: A Dialogue on Black Sea Files and Contained Mobility. In Tipografías políticas/Political Typographies, pp. 35–45. Barcelona: Fundació Tàpies/Actar. Demos, T.J. (2006) A Life Full of Holes. Grey Room, 24, 72–87. Wolf, M.J.P. (1999) Subjunctive Documentary: Computer Imaging and Simulation. In Gaines, J.M. and Renov, M. (eds.) Collecting Visible Evidence, pp. 274–291. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

5

Rates of Exchange

Human Trafficking and the Global Marketplace Leshu Torchin

Introduction1 Since 1992, the world has witnessed significant geopolitical shifts that have exacerbated border permeability. The fall of the “iron curtain” in Eastern Europe and the consolidation of the transnational constitutional order of the European Union have facilitated transnational movement and given rise to fears of an encroaching Eastern threat, seen in the Polish plumber of a UKIP2 fever dream. Meanwhile, global business and economic expansion, granted renewed strength through enhancements in communication and transportation technologies as well as trade policies implemented through international financial institutions, have increased demand for overseas resources of labor, goods, and services. This is not so much a new phenomenon, as a rapidly accelerating one. In the wake of these changes, there has been a resurgence of human trafficking films, many of which readily tap into the gendered and racialized aspects of the changing social landscape (Andrjasevic, 2007; Brown et al., 2010). The popular genre film, Taken (Pierre Morel, France, 2008) for instance, invokes the multiple anxieties in a story of a young American girl who visits Paris only to be kidnapped by Albanian mobsters and auctioned off to Arab sheiks before she is rescued by her renegade, one-time CIA agent father. These narratives of subjugation and confinement followed by repatriation or death dramatize the fantasy of managing the unruly wandering body of economic migrants. Meanwhile, the frame of explicit criminality provides comfort by delineating movement and identifying offense, offender, and (errant) victim. Further reassurance comes as these dramatizations celebrate the capacity of cinema to visualize the unseen paths and to manage this new, A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



Rates of Exchange

109

complicated landscape. In a manner, the film enacts the strict border maintenance and social policing recommended in response to the social panics around sexual slavery that surface alongside the surges in globalization (Kempadoo, 2011). Conversely, the documentary, invested with epistemological and ontological authority, contributes to this cycle with films that intentionally complicate the landscape. They visualize the many cultural flows of people, technology, and capital (or “ethnoscapes,” “technoscapes,” and “financescapes” – to use the suffix that identifies the varied, uneven, and socially imagined aspects of these flows). And in doing so, many also recognize the global landscape “as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order” (Appadurai, 1990: 296) which has outgrown the simple formulations and binarisms and defies a straightforward resurrection of borders. In their exploration of human trafficking, these films locate the disjunctions, inequities, and lived challenges of the new global order. Defined as the “recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons … for the purpose of exploitation [including] … prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery” (UN Protocol on Traffic, 2000: Article 3a), human trafficking invokes the intersection of human movement and trade. While dramatic features center on the ethnoscape as territory in need of management, the documentaries call attention to the economic underpinnings, presenting the intersecting ethno-, finance-, and technoscapes that inform global enterprise. In doing so, they not only animate the complexities of economic globalization, but they also highlight the injustices that take place in the interstices – those zones where licit and illicit economies overlap and test human trafficking’s definitional borders. The disruptive cartography is further enhanced by an engagement with the genre hybridity that inheres to the documentary mode. The task of representing reality has been long fraught and explored in documentary scholarship, or as Michael Renov notes, “Every documentary representation depends upon its own detour from the real, through the defiles of the audio-visual signifier” (1993: 7). Although far from unclassifiable, some of the films play with the expectations of generic distinction, highlighting the fictional elements of the documentary or the documentary elements of a fiction. Thematically and formally, then, they call attention to the instabilities of border control, lifting the topic of human trafficking from a frame of pure criminality and placing it within the common flows of the contemporary global economy.

The Other Europe In contrast to the narratives of popular European cinema that agonize over the encroachment of the East, the documentary Det Andet Europa (The Other Europe) (Poul-Erik Heilbuth, Denmark, 2006) argues that far from posing a domestic threat, undocumented workers play a fundamental and inextricable role in the European economy. To address this topic, the filmmaker deploys two distinct strategies. First,

110

Leshu Torchin

Heilbuth focuses on Spain’s many greenhouses, which grow vegetables that are then sold in supermarkets throughout Europe. He interviews employers and government officials who concede the centrality of clandestine workers to the economy; the cost of employing a European is prohibitive – even if Europeans would be willing to take these positions, which they are not. He also concentrates on the African workers and their stories of dangerous passage and living conditions. Having braved death, many now endure separation from their families to whom they send the bulk of their wages. According to the director, this income plays a significant role in the revenue of developing nations – more so than aid from the West. These testimonies, combined with the consumable data of numbers and statistics, outline the unofficial flows of labor, people, and finance. As if to underscore the overlap of these circuits and the prominence of a shadow economy, Heilbuth incorporates a re-enactment of the 2004 Morecambe Bay disaster in which 23 Chinese cockle-pickers lost their lives in what is considered to be one of Britain’s worst industrial accidents. Threading this fictional component through the documentary dramatizes the dangers the African laborers describe and confers vivid urgency to a hidden topic. At the same time, these fluctuations between reenactment, the fictive element that illustrates testimony, and the more popularly accepted documentary features of eyewitness testimony and observation mirror the instability of borders within the many scapes of the global economy. Later, Heilbuth visits China and the families of the victims, finding poverty and grief: the sources and outcomes of migration and undocumented labor. If there is a Europe endangered by this immigration issue, it is the other Europe Heilbuth presents onscreen. Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts (UK, 2006) draws on the Morecambe Bay disaster in order to explore similar themes. However, instead of a documentary that relies on re-enactment, Broomfield – known principally as a documentary filmmaker – relies on documentary conceits within a fictional feature film that is more inspired by the tragedy than directly based on it. Long takes, a hand-held camera in social space, and video contribute the formal register of realism and highlight the more mundane elements of labor. For the filming of the work sequences, whether in the poultry processing plant, the orchards, or the fields, Broomfield opted to film days of work. The shooting strategy mimics the observational documentary, allowing for the inclusion of the non-cinematic moments of staring, awkward silences, and even boredom, all of which are part of a day’s work. This strategy results in the depiction of the liminal moments that are so familiar, and yet typically absent from the spectacle of popular cinema, not to mention consumer consciousness. In this way, the patience of the observational mode recovers the disarticulation of worker, work, and product, creating a site of multiple scapes, performing a unity that combats the alienating elements of global capitalism. These flows are not distinct and separate, but features of this larger map. Improvised dialogue and the use of non-actors may confer authenticity, but perhaps more importantly foster an encounter of documentary and drama that lays a conceptual foundation for the overlapping and intersecting flows of people and finance. Ai Qin Lin, a former undocumented worker, plays a version of herself in the



Rates of Exchange

111

protagonist Ai Qin from the Fujian province. The performance engineers an occasion for her own testimony of a hidden experience as it also allows, through the performance of a self that is not the self, the enactment of the uncertain status of the clandestine worker within policy and industry. These generic border-crossings recall other passages across shifting scapes and permeable boundaries. Moreover, they gesture to the intersections of the criminal and the mainstream, where financial bondage and coercion underlie even the most seemingly legitimate economies. Smuggled into the United Kingdom in order to provide for her family back home, Ai Qin is bound by debt to snakeheads, living in filthy and overcrowded quarters and made to work long hours for below subsistence wages by the recruitment company. Her marginalization persists despite her key function in the European economy. In one scene, Ai Qin and her colleagues enter Tesco to shop for dinner; there they see the bundles of spring onions – likely the ones they had picked and prepared earlier that day – that are priced beyond their budget. The sequence stages an encounter of the invisible workers with the fruits of their labor on the turf of the benefiting corporation, making manifest the relationships that go unseen. Unable to make enough money to repay debts and support their families, the workers are driven to seek out increasingly dangerous forms of work, and in the case of Ghosts, this is represented through the evocation of a horrific industrial tragedy. This terminology (“industrial”) is essential for recognizing the place of this tragedy within a larger framework of Britain’s economy and the expectations of health and safety protections within the workplace. Exposing the range of threats faced by illegal immigrants, Broomfield refuses a view of globalization through the lens of stricter border management – generic and geopolitical – as he opens questions about obligations within industrial practice. The twin documentaries Fra Thailand til Thy (Love on Delivery) and Fra Thy til Thailand (Ticket to Paradise) (Janus Metz, Denmark, 2008), and Otan erthei i mama gia ta Hristougenna (When Mother Comes Home for Christmas) (Nilita Vachani, Greece/India/Germany, 1996) further engage and trouble the boundaries between the official and unofficial in films that visualize the collision of global flows taking place within the domestic sphere. Early in When Mother Comes Home for Christmas, Josephine Perera, a Sri Lankan housemaid, cares for her European charge as they sit together in a flat in Greece before a television playing the American soap opera, The Young and the Restless (CBS-TV, 1973–2009). With understated eloquence and efficiency the scene presents the interconnection and overlap of ethnoscapes and mediascapes that undergird the documentary. Having finally secured a work visa in Greece, Josephine is able to return home and visit the family she has not seen in eight years. Following Josephine on her journey, the documentary offers a look at the national practices of exporting labor and the unseen human costs arising from the uneven distribution of global capital. The resulting disparity is not only financial but emotional as well. As an observational documentary, the formal elements are more traditional than the former examples. And yet, the film, with its relative absence of filmmaker presence and standardized talking head interviews, carries the impression of a scripted

112

Leshu Torchin

narrative. This does not diminish the truth-claims, but rather, enhances the presentation of a world hidden within another landscape. The film opens with Josephine praying in a Greek church for her family’s well-being and for a house they might one day share. Her catalogue of hopes is interrupted by informational titles that expand on the implications of these domestic dreams and are intertwined with national financial operations. Almost one out of ten Sri Lankans work abroad as the local economy “depends on the export of labor,” an export that has since exceeded that of tea in earnings. The titles continue: “70% of women workers are housemaids in foreign lands. They send their earnings to families left behind.” This seemingly informal labor economy has institutional and national underpinnings, revealed in the presence of the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE). According to its website (SLBFE, n.d.), the bureau “has given the highest priority to prompting [sic] foreign employment and maintains a database that lists jobs available by country and by local recruiting agent.” This public corporation, operating under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Foreign Employment Provision, finances itself through the fees and commissions paid through recruitment agencies, thereby positioning itself as a legal hub for trade in human resources. The bureau regulates services, provides training, aids in visa acquisitions, and “[protects] foreign migrants”; protective measures include the monitoring of recruitment agencies, the provision of safe houses, and scholarship funds for the children of migrants. “Our Concern Today, Your Well Being [sic] Tomorrow!” reads the bureau’s curious slogan, which overflows with potential meanings. At first glance, the motto promises local workers jobs that can bring financial well-being to them and their families. Read as a promise to recruiters, this can take on a grimmer cast: The national concern of an impoverished population can be transformed into the well-being of the foreign employer. Broader interpretation suggests benefits to the economy through the circulation and exchange of products and goods, human and otherwise. As Josephine prepares for her trip home, making purchases for her family, a song produced by the SLBFE plays on the soundtrack. “How lucky I am to live in a foreign land … Return home with treasures for everyone,” a woman sings. This combination hints at the possibilities of this economy and draws attention to those that benefit: a larger global exchange economy beginning with the companies that find even more consumers for their products, and a national economy that finds additional sources of revenue. Local development appears as well: Josephine has helped her son, Suresh, to buy a bus to build his own transportation industry, an alternative to the government transit system and to a private competitor who runs a fleet of eight buses. The depiction of the SLBFE and its training schemes indicates the institutionalization of an informal economy. The women learn how to vacuum, bake, clean, and prepare a European tea service. In a more provocative instant, they are trained on how to use condoms, a hint at sexual encounters, wanted or coerced. The sequence begins with the lecture and demonstrations by the instructor, before leading into the tinny notes of a recorded lecture. The disembodied voice charges the housemaids to be clean and tidy, whether working or not. It encourages, “Show your



Rates of Exchange

113

master or madam that you are working hard … If they see you working hard, they will be very happy. Your future will be a great success.” Editing connects this sequence in Sri Lanka to Josephine’s life in Europe. As the lecture plays, a housemaid trainee cleans with the other trainees standing in the reflection behind. A match cut joins them to Josephine, alone, in Greece, framed and boxed in by the mirror she wipes down. The army of Sri Lankan housemaids is invisible in this European picture. There may be success to come, but from the start, the cost is implied in visions of isolation and exile. Supported by the government, this domestic export of foreign labor would seem to fall outside the definition of trafficking, which brings to mind force, captivity, and slavery. Yet not only do financial and state pressures exert their own forms of coercion, asking one group to sacrifice for the freedom and comfort of others, but there are also significant risks involved in this legal trade. In 2012, Human Rights Watch praised the establishment of a global labor standard, noting a decade of reports of “pervasive abuses and labor exploitation, including excessively long working hours without rest; unpaid wages for months or years; forced confinement in the workplace; food deprivation; verbal, physical, and sexual abuse; and forced labor including debt bondage and trafficking” (Varia and Becker, 2012). Although reports of abuse and enforced servitude lurk at the margins of When Mother Comes Home for Christmas, there are clear indications of the disparity of treatment. According to Josephine, a Sri Lankan housemaid in the Middle East earns $100 per month whereas in Europe, one earns $500 per month. Her experience, as it turns out, is perhaps closer to these circumstances than the film indicates. The SLBFE does not have any trade agreements with Europe, and negotiates primarily with the Middle East and East Asia. Josephine, who was working illegally in Greece until shortly before the film, had initially gone through the SLBFE to Kuwait on a two-year contract. While there, she managed to pay a ring of smugglers to take her into Greece. Her story becomes one of the few success stories of this trade in people. Her employers, who were “influential and connected,” helped Josephine procure a work visa by getting her papers as a trained nurse.3 Even as a rare success story, it is one suffused with sacrifice and struggle: returning home is a rarity, and her family suffers in her absence. Shortly after Josephine is introduced as one of Sri Lanka’s primary exports, the film argues for an emotional economy tied to the financial and global one. Josephine’s son Suresh may enjoy more clear benefits, but her younger son Suminda stays in Bosco Boarding and Orphanage in Hatton, Sri Lanka. A heartbreaking sequence animates the dramatic disparities in a capital of care as it compares Josephine’s daily tending to her charge, Isadora, with the stark existence of Suminda in Sri Lanka. In Greece, Isadora lies on a soft bed, soothed by soft pastel colors and surrounded by giant stuffed animals. She says her evening prayers in the gaze of a loving father, and the doting Josephine. Back in the Sri Lankan orphanage, a group of boys stand in darkness as all their voices join in unison to read out their evening prayer, one whose words are grim even in the best circumstances (“if I should die before I wake …”). The depictions of morning activities maintain the stark comparison. The boys move about in an echoing dark space

114

Leshu Torchin

surrounded by walls made of stone, each component contributing to a portrait of a cold and austere life. The contrast continues in a scene illustrating Isadora’s morning routine. She is sprawled across her bed as a fluffy cat leaps up to join her. Josephine enters and softly strokes the girl’s back, whispering at her that it’s morning, and time to wake. In the bathroom, Isadora splashes in the tub, chattering to Josephine, and basking in the joys of this one-on-one attention. Things are not so kind at the orphanage, where the boys gather in a dark room, pouring jugs of water on themselves as they are chastised for talking. They dress behind a wire barrier whose actual function is unclear but whose cinematic function is not. Here we find the captivity and callousness that come in this legitimate economy of human servitude. Moreover, Suminda is not alone in this orphanage; his peers directly address the camera, introducing themselves and stating where their parents now work and in what capacity. Yes it’s a boarding house, but also an orphanage: Whether their parents have been stolen into slavery or are participating in this foreign export system voluntarily, the children at home are abandoned, and longing for their parents. The final sequence of the film is deliberately open-ended, combining an epistolary voice-over with glimpses of life in Sri Lanka, producing a juxtaposition that communicates the structuring absence of the local economy. Josephine reads a letter to Suresh and his wife, Chooti, over an image of Chooti sweeping the bus Josephine’s money has purchased for them. The voice-over notes two weeks have passed since her return, but the days have been filled with work, preventing any peaceful, solitary moments. “My arms ache with all the cleaning. Otherwise, I am well.” She laments the speed of her visit, the failure to accomplish her goals, and the time spent bickering. She asks the family to help care for Suminda, as he needs to improve his performance in order to attend a better school. As she reads these last parts of her letter, the camera sits on a train, capturing the movement of continuing departure and hinting at global traffic. Over this scene, Josephine observes, “More and more girls from Lanka cross the borders illegally into Greece and suffer great hardship. I am so lucky to have a visa.” This is the bittersweet irony: Josephine is lucky. As an economic migrant, she has secured papers and avoided the slavery faced by many. At the same time, her ambition to provide for her family is met with frustration and suffering, emotional and practical. With sequences such as this, Vachani illustrates the painful personal cost of the global economy and its institutionalized human trade. Inspired by the proliferation of international marriages taking place in a remote fishing community in North Jutland, the documentary Love on Delivery and its sequel/companion piece Ticket to Paradise offer a surprisingly gentle examination of a phenomenon upon which flows of people, finance, and labor converge. The depiction of these expedient (yet often affectionate) arrangements places marriage within contexts of sex work, domestic labor, and economic migration. But rather than flatten the landscape, this approach provides a richer and more nuanced understanding of contemporary global flows. At the center of these transactions stands Sommai, a former prostitute who met her husband Niels in Pattaya, one of Thailand’s sex cities where Niels was, by his own



Rates of Exchange

115

admission, a “sex tourist.” Once the sole Thai woman in the region, she has since brokered multiple marriages between lonely Danish men and Thai women looking for ways to support their families. From the start, marriage is presented as a commercial transaction as Sommai and her husband Niels write an advertisement for her niece, Kae, who seeks a Danish husband. While it could be tempting to read this as a simple lonely hearts advert, the narrative positioning suggests otherwise as interviews reveal the history of the couple on screen. Connecting the writing of this advert to the history of the couple forges an association between sex work, marriage, and a global industry predicated on the movement of people. Beyond the history of Sommai, traces of sex trade pervade both films, implicitly and explicitly. In a sequence showing the Thai cultural events that have popped up in the region, an observational camera finds the women preparing for the festivities, applying make-up and donning skimpy clothes. Their excitement stems from the diaspora community fostered through such events and from the potential the evening can hold. These evenings function as meeting spaces, a site of marriage brokering as indicated in one Dane’s fond recollection: It was at one such event that Sommai first showed him a photograph of her other niece Mong, prompting love at first sight and his decision to make her his wife. (Mong’s response is decidedly more cynical, wondering how he could know such a thing.) Meanwhile, the women dance with each other in ways that suggest both the pleasures of the disco and a knowing performance of their sexual appeal for the men looking on. In Ticket to Paradise, set in Thailand five months after the end of Love on Delivery, the young Saeng meets with Sommai to learn of potential prospects of international marriage. However, when she learns that at 23, she is still too young to migrate to Denmark, Saeng moves to Pattaya to become a prostitute. There she will not only be able to provide for her family, including her young son, but she may, like Sommai, meet a foreigner to marry. The films do not disavow the potential for affection in these unions, but they are nonetheless positioned on the continuum of a (global) trade in bodies. The films identify this trade in bodies – both prostitution and marriage – as labor by highlighting the training and information exchange necessary in cultivating successful domesticity. Ticket to Paradise features women learning Danish in a building labeled “Thai Integration Centre,” an apparently formal acknowledgment of the informal marriage economy. Instructors also provide guidance on cultural matters and visa issues. Love on Delivery presents training on a more casual level. Women convene to discuss the problems they encounter, such as the challenges of sexual intercourse with Danish men, who are larger than their Thai counterparts. Sommai, however, provides more explicit instruction and management of the potential unions. She teaches Kae Danish phrases, including “Good morning,” “Good night,” “Does it taste good,” and “I have a headache,” the latter two indicating the type of domestic work expected of Kae: cooking and company. Sommai explains that a kiss is required with each good morning and good night, and repeatedly tells her not to be “shy,” that she is expected to give hugs and kisses. Indeed, this admonishment not

116

Leshu Torchin

to be shy carries through this film and into the next, where Saeng’s friend tells her not to be shy in matters of fellatio and intercourse. Marital expectations are only one dimension of this labor. When the women discuss their reasoning for the move, they refer to their plans to work in Denmark. They do not simply sell their bodies in exchange for economic support; they trade their bodies for an opportunity to make money to send back home. The transaction encompasses more than the bride and groom as the women strive to provide for their families in Thailand. “I would like a job so I could send money home,” explains Kae. Mong outlines this larger goal on her commute to the fish processing plant where she works. Sitting on the bus, she speaks of her Aunt Sommai, who “sent money home to our family.” She continues, “I thought of coming to Denmark for a long time until Aunt Sommai got me here. I was sure that my life would be so much better.” As Mong speaks, she is visible both in her bus seat and in the window’s reflection, an expression of both her possible ambivalence regarding this better life, and her doubled position: She lives in Denmark to provide for her family in Thailand. Ticket to Paradise illustrates the fruits of her labor, presenting the different houses that Sommai’s financing has purchased. These new model homes stand in contrast to the shacks that are also a part of the small village. The agency of these women entering an uneasy, but otherwise free, alliance may seem to be in conflict with the basic definition of human trafficking as modern slavery. Associations are further diminished as Metz avoids the more grueling and brutal stories, neglecting the abusive, captive marriages this scenario spurs. And the cases of Thai and Somali prostitutes in Denmark only exist in hints, as when the women complain that Danish men tend to presume they are for sale.4 Nevertheless, Metz’s documentaries present an exchange economy involved in the practice of moving bodies, wherein parties are bonded and where questions of domestic labor and financial dealings sit at the fore. While the transactions carry an affective, and indeed, affectionate dimension, they are intimately tied to the operations that underpin a trafficking economy. These films complicate the terrain in important ways, not only as texts that give economic (or transactional) value to domestic labor but as texts that open a place for agency in contemporary phenomena of trafficking and migration. These are not stories of innocents abducted and enslaved, whose only relief comes from repatriation. These are more difficult stories, of the bodily negotiations that take place on a global landscape, where one barters oneself for economic security. As Siddharth Kara observes, the risk of sex trafficking in Thailand is tied to cultural obligations of parental caretaking, where women can be sold into prostitution to provide for their families (Kara, 2009). Arranged marriage inhabits the other side of this coin. That genuine affection can also bloom in these arrangements does not dispel the dangers, nor does it dismiss the root causes of poverty and global disparity. The presence of emotion serves to remind us of how very much is bound up in financial and bureaucratic transactions. Lines are not so clearly drawn in this field. This attention to the range of domestic compromises within these global economic operations traces the complex and at times contradictory affinities and expediencies in these arrangements.



Rates of Exchange

117

Mobilizing Confinements Movement is prominent in the films discussed so far. Bodies cross borders in various ways. Transit and transition are multiply figured. Ghosts and The Other Europe address irregular migration as they expose the clandestine integration into mainstream economics. When Mother Comes Home for Christmas, Love on Delivery, and Ticket to Paradise show the import and export of domestic workers that, while not human trafficking, arguably inhabits a space on that continuum. The next set of films takes up another transitional state, delving into the slavery-like conditions of legal enterprise and international policy. In doing so, they recalibrate the portrait of economic globalization as something that confines rather than liberates, and that very possibly ushers in a new set of human rights abuses. In effect, they introduce a laborscape into the realm of cultural flows, depicting the discontinuities, inequities, and increased complications as workers are disarticulated from their labor, held captive within the flows of finance and technology. Stephanie Black’s documentaries explore the national and international financial policies and practices, which mirror old, now illegal frameworks of slavery. H-2 Worker (US, 1990) takes its name from the H-2A temporary agricultural program that brings “nonimmigrant foreign workers to the U.S. to perform agricultural labor or services of a temporary or seasonal nature” (H-2A, n.d.). H-2 Worker depicts the lives of Jamaican and Caribbean workers who come to Florida for six months out of each year to cut sugar cane by hand. The workers live in overcrowded and dilapidated barracks and receive little subsistence in terms of food, wages, and medical care for workplace injuries. Interviews with workers and company representatives offer contrasting perspectives. In one sequence, men wash in outdoor pumps, hanging their clothes over the balconies of their building. Over this image, the representative of the Florida Sugar Cane League declares that the men’s conditions are fully compliant with US regulations. He continues by praising their own efforts to provide Jamaican food for the workers, a statement that reaches for support in an image of a lunch line, each tray slopped with rice. The representative declares that this would not be a suitable diet for Americans, but is acceptable to these workers. The workers, however, beg to differ. They say they cannot do this hard work on a diet of rice, and must supplement their rations with purchases from the company store. These purchases, meanwhile, deplete an already meager wage that drops below the US minimum. And yet, according to the company officials, the practices meet every standard. A culture of fear dominates. One worker repeatedly asks Black if she is with the government; a shopkeeper describes the workers as silent, frightened of losing their jobs and being deported. Indeed, workers who submit to interviews explain that the companies give the names of “troublemakers” to the Jamaican government, to ensure their removal from future work rosters. Black repeatedly draws connections between the old slave trade and this new scheme of contingent labor. At each step, the film links the old and new plantations, perhaps most so when pointing out the history of the H-2 program, which began in

118

Leshu Torchin

1943, shortly after the “U.S. Sugar Cane Corporation was indicted for conspiracy to enslave black American workers” (H-2 Worker, n.d.). One of those AfricanAmerican workers describes his experience, rousted in the middle of the night to work, and threatened with knives and rifles at every step. It was almost the same as prison, he declares. Global capital informs the maintenance of this laborscape. According to an intertitle, the US government aggressively subsidizes domestic sugar production whilst imposing severe quotas on sugar imports. The restrictions on the imported product do not extend to the import of labor, whose arrival scenes reverberate with scenes of other historical transports. Taking place under cover of night, men line up to take decrepit busses to the “camps” (their word). The account of a US guest worker scheme recalls the nightmares of deportation, internment, and even the Atlantic passage. Black’s next documentary Life and Debt (US, 2001) continues this exploration, this time around the impact of global financial institutions – the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – in Jamaica. The film argues that these global lenders have not produced development in Jamaica as promised. Rather, the pressure to privatize has led to increased interest and cutbacks of aid, forcing Jamaica into economic dependence and impeding rights to an adequate standard of living and just and favorable working conditions. In other words, debt to global economic institutions is a form of debt bondage that leaves entire nations open to exploitation and abuse. Black’s strategy is particularly noteworthy as its fuses the violation of human trafficking (debt bondage) with the violations of economic human rights as assured under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the International Bill of Human Rights (UN). She makes this argument apparent throughout the film, particularly in the segment on Free Trade Zones, areas throughout Kingston, Jamaica that are available for use by foreign companies at low prices. These sites bring in materials tax-free, benefit from cheap Jamaican labor to manufacture goods, and then immediately transport completed goods to overseas markets. Interviews with the laborers support claims of exploitation and abuse of their economic rights: wages are low and frequently withheld, efforts to organize or strike result in blacklisting (the Jamaican government, in order to maintain this steady source of income, has prohibited unionization in the Free Trade Zones), and the set-up hinders most access to basic standards of living. The images that accompany these stories remind the viewer of the human cost and the specter of violence in these scenarios. Living conditions of the women interviewed are substandard as they stand before threadbare homes. The subsistence level and the disparity of distribution is evident throughout a film that counterpoints the tourist’s Jamaica with that of the locals. One sequence shows a flourishing local chicken plant devastated by the dumping of US low-grade chicken parts. Substandard food floods the region, as there are no trade protections. The checkpoint at the Free Trade Zone is adorned with barbed wire, a sight that contradicts any trace of freedom in this space as it so clearly evokes the concentration camp. This imagery filters the violation through the charged lens of political rights, prompting recognition of the human cost of these economic policies.



Rates of Exchange

119

With the Free Trade Zone sequence, Life and Debt introduces confinement within global flows. Although the Jamaican economy is integrated into the international marketplace, the Jamaican people are bound by debt to the IMF and World Bank, compelled to work in exploitative conditions, with, in effect, no way out. Disparity and asymmetry within formal economic policy comes to the fore in this discussion of globalization. A cycle of factory documentaries continues this examination, recognizing that the transnational movement of finance may pose greater threats than the transnational movement of people. While many of the films so far have shown how flows of people and labor combine and overlap in globalizing processes, these films call attention to their disarticulation. Maquilapolis: City of Factories (Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre, Mexico/US, 2006) offers a diary of workers’ struggles in an industrial district in Tijuana where raw products become commodities with the assistance of free trade agreements, tax benefits, and cheap labor. Internal migrants come to work here at substantial risk, as the protagonists explain, to their safety and security, with poor working conditions, exposure to toxic chemicals, and frequently withheld payments. Although much of its power comes from the individual testimonies and the stories of their struggle for justice, the film introduces a compelling component of re-enactment: As if performing calisthenics the subjects of the film gather on the landscape and replicate the movements of work, en masse, but outside the factories. These gestures recognize the work done and restore this labor to the bodies of the worker. At the same time, the activity introduces a play that slyly ushers the documentary into the consideration of intersecting scapes; the women in motion perform their experience of labor for a documentary economy. And like the other forms of experimentation and hybridity that characterize some of the earlier films discussed, the re-enactments here come less out of a necessity to provide B-roll footage, than out of a spirit that seeks to test the borders of the documentary, as these new flows test geopolitical and bodily borders. Offscreen collaboration further tests the expected documentary economy in which filmmakers traffic in the work and work product of their social actors. Funari and de la Torre worked with the maquiladoras of Tijuana and the community organizers at all stages – from preproduction to outreach – in order to “ensure that the film’s voice will be truly that of its subjects” (Maquilapolis, n.d.). The performance may enact the disarticulations, but the activity as combined with the overall project seeks to rejoin the workers with their voice, their agency, and their labor. A set of documentaries focused on Chinese factories offer vivid tallies, tracing costs from production line to distributor to end product, giving both numbers and depictions of lives on all ends of the chain. Mardi Gras: Made in China (David Redmon, US, 2006) juxtaposes scenes of carefree revelry with scenes of life in a Chinese bead factory, complete with the unholy trinity – seen in several of the aforementioned documentaries – of long hours, low pay, and exposure to toxic materials. One worker calculates her compensation for this work: one cent for 12 necklaces with her monthly pay topping out at US$62. The price of a strand is a day’s wages for

120

Leshu Torchin

these laborers. China Blue (Micha X. Peled, US, 2005) offers a similar accounting in a focus on the operations of a blue jeans factory from the perspective of a young worker, Jasmine Li, whose story is related through observational footage, an occasional interview clip, but also a voice-over diary. This diary, a composite of multiple testimonies, functions on multiple levels: it produces a source of personal identification; it offers organizational structure; and it may even gesture to another diary of a young girl – a diary that once again invokes the relationship between confinement, the present conditions, and political human rights abuses. Li describes her long working days and low pay made lower by an absence of minimum wage, fines for falling asleep, deductions for food and lodging and a “deposit” – money withheld in the first month in order to stop a worker from leaving the factory. Meanwhile, sequences depicting business meetings between the factory manager and the international distributors give an economic rationale for this treatment. The distributors want to purchase their jeans at a lower cost so they might in turn sell them at prices attractive to the European and Turkish consumers. The practices behind making affordable jeans are predicated on practices that confine and abuse the workers. A Decent Factory (Thomas Balmès, France/Finland/UK/Australia/Denmark, 2004) follows Nokia’s internal ethics advisor and a British ethics consultant on a trip to Shenzhen, China, to audit the operations of a factory making parts for Nokia phones. Nokia, a company based in Finland, takes advantage of the lower costs of manufacture and wages. However, on this tour, they learn that the conditions in these workplaces would not be sustainable within the legal framework of Europe. In effect, the basic subsistence level and labor rights demanded in Europe are not met in these factories, and the European company benefits from this arrangement. The sequences here do not provide scenes of tragic violence, such as the industrial disaster at Morecambe Bay; these scenes do not even provide extreme examples of sweatshop labor, with underage girls toiling for pennies. The film is more elegant in its ethical inquiries. Coercion and exploitation arrive in the form of the absence of contracts and the economic need of the workers who risk losing their jobs should they complain. And there are causes for complaint. Much like the situations depicted in China Blue, the rural migrants live in cramped, monitored dormitories at a cost deducted from their pay – a less than minimum wage salary. The pay is hardly augmented by the involuntary overtime or the six-day workweek of 12-hour shifts. The health and safety conditions are equally dismal, if not as threatening as the nightmare scenarios of sexual slavery and cruel sweatshops. Toxic chemicals are stored in the place where the workers make their tea; upon the visitors observing this danger, the manager demands the bins are stored elsewhere. The women work without magnifying mirrors, straining their eyes over detailed work. Most startling, and best expressed through film, is the sound: the factory environment is a deafening one, and the workers have no ear protection. Conversation cannot be heard by anyone – on and offscreen alike. These violations fall short of the horrifying visions supplied by body farming or sex traffic films. However, they highlight the exploitation of workers that arises out of the flows of finance and labor that benefit European (and by implication,



Rates of Exchange

121

American) corporations. In addition, the lack of grave abuses contributes to this ongoing asymmetrical relationship: these interactions are not clearly actionable, and not so readily ended or avoided. The film’s epilogue articulates the ambivalence of the circumstance. Hanna Kaskinen, head of the ethics department, has retired from Nokia, unable to reconcile what she has witnessed with her mission to correct these practices. She explains this as she walks along a snow-covered path, when she spots dog waste. Maintaining distance, she attempts to manage this blemish on the landscape, poking and burying it with her ski pole. She finally manages to toss the waste out of sight into the nearby shrubbery. Out of sight might be out of mind, but the film’s work reminds us of these connections and relationships, of the ugliness that mars the transnational economic ecosystem, hidden though it may be from view, and the shades of slavery that haunt the European landscape. The incorporation of new global technologies in film makes this new world order explicit. Alex Rivera’s Why Cybraceros? (US, 1997) combines science fiction with mockumentary in a five-minute spoof of a very real promotional film, Why Braceros? (US, ca. 1959). Produced by Wilding Picture Productions for the Council of California Growers, Braceros outlines the use of workers under the Braceros program for temporary immigrant Mexican labor (1942–1964) that likely served as a template for the H-2 program. Rivera’s short follows the same line of explanation and defense, explaining the value of such assistance for American production before revealing the twist: the Mexican workers can telecommute as they operate robots over the Internet. As the website explains, ‘The Cybracero, as a trouble free, no commitment, low cost laborer, is the perfect immigrant. The Cybracero is the hi-tech face of the age-old American Dream” (Why Cybraceros?, n.d.). Cybraceros and the workers of this film are pure labor exported through circuits of technology and finance; people are of minimal concern in this portrait, which has disarticulated the labor from the human, the flows of labor from the flows of people.5 At the same time, its generic play once again gestures to the enmeshment of flows, perhaps in this case, the dominating flow of capital that informs all others. These fantasies are not so far off. The very real use of technologies in restricting movement whilst exporting labor is the topic of multiple documentaries about call centers. Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night (Sonali Gulati, US, 2005), John & Jane (Ashim Ahluwalia, India, 2005), and Bombay Calling (Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal, Canada, 2006), for instance, focus on the Indian context, addressing the impact of economic globalization on local, human culture. This transformation is made evident in the titles of the first two films, which address the changes in culture brought on through this new form of work, new hours, and an expectation to tailor one’s professional self to the cultural preferences of the overseas client. By this point, I have clearly pressed the definition of human trafficking to its limits, unpacking the variations in transportation, coercion, and exploitation. The intent here is not to diminish the suffering of those held captive, subject to forced violations of their bodies in beating, rape, and dismemberment. Rather, I seek to open up a more complex overview, where trafficking occurs not only in operations veiled in underground criminality but also in arrangements hidden by distance and state complicity.

122

Leshu Torchin

If the clandestine elements of a criminal trade did not sufficiently obfuscate the circuits and practices, the temporary nature of contemporary slavery does: people pass in and out of exploitative conditions and confinement as the practice itself seems to drift in and out of legality courtesy of economic globalization. Films about trafficking become means of visualizing these unseen currents, and more importantly, of introducing the human element into the flows of capital, labor, and technology. In this way, these documentaries articulate concerns with globalization in its present incarnation, and ask us to see globalization and human trafficking as issues beyond the movement of people, tamed and managed through security measures. Instead, as they present a more complex landscape and test their own borders between fiction and non-fiction, they invite new thinking about policies, about the needed forms of protection on a transnational level, and about the ways that these global flows affect us all.

Notes 1 This chapter incorporates elements of the chapter “Foreign Exchange” in Brown, Iordanova, and Torchin (2010: 49–83). Portions have also been drawn from the book’s “Close-Ups” section. 2 UKIP refers to the UK Independence Party, which seeks withdrawal from the European Union. 3 From a personal communication with NilitaVachani, May 5, 2009. 4 One reason for this absence – structural or otherwise – may be the invisibility of those participating in a criminal enterprise, which necessarily operates clandestinely and eschews the spotlight of the camera. Some documentaries do manage to film rather than imagine these cases. The Price of Sex (Mimi Chakarova, US, 2011), for instance, is a documentary that provides rare eyewitness testimony and hidden camera footage; but this remains a challenge for the documentary filmmaker. 5 Rivera has since built on this idea with his film Sleep Dealers (Mexico/US, 2008). In a dystopic future, the US borders are closed. Instead, major cities in Mexico serve as technological and labor hubs where workers literally plug their bodies into a network to control robots throughout the world.

References Andrjasevic, Rutvica (2007) Beautiful Dead Bodies: Gender, Migration, and Representation in Anti-Trafficking Campaigns. Feminist Review, 86, 24–44. Appadurai, Arjun (1990) Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Theory, Culture and Society, 7, 295–310. Brown, Will, Iordanova, Dina, and Torchin, Leshu (2010) Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe. St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies. H-2 Worker (n.d.) About H-2 Worker, http://www.lifeanddebt.org/h2worker/, accessed July 22, 2014. H-2A (n.d.) H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program. US Department of Labor, http://www. foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/h-2a.cfm, accessed July 22, 2014.



Rates of Exchange

123

Kara, Siddharth (2009) Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. New York: Columbia University Press. Kempadoo, Kemala (ed.) (2011) Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights, 2nd edn. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Maquilapolis (n.d.) http://www.maquilapolis.com/project_eng.htm, accessed July 22, 2014. Renov, Michael (1993) Introduction: The Truth About Non-Fiction. In Theorizing Documentary, pp. 1–11. New York: Routledge. SLBFE (n.d.) Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment, http://www.slbfe.lk/article. php?article=23, accessed July 22, 2014. UN Protocol on Traffic (2000) Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children. United Nations, http://untreaty.un.org/English/ TreatyEvent2003/Texts/treaty2E.pdf, accessed July 22, 2014. Varia, Nisha and Becker, Jo (2012) World Report 2012: A Landmark Victory for Domestic Workers. Human Rights Watch, http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2012/world-report2012-landmark-victory-domestic-workers, accessed July 22, 2014. Why Cybraceros? (n.d.) http://alexrivera.com/project/why-cybraceros/, accessed July 22, 2014.

6

Documenting What? Auto-Theory and Migratory Aesthetics Mieke Bal

Introduction This chapter emerged from a practice I have been calling “auto-theory.” With this term I refer to a spiral-like activity: as a scholar, I was confronted with the shortcomings of written documentation especially for the understanding of contemporary culture, which is by definition still “in becoming.” As a way out, some 10 years ago I began to make documentary films. These films and what they showed me became, then, secondary objects of analysis. Learning from and theorizing what I learned by reconsidering my own films, yielded insights brought forth by the people “in” them. This became an ongoing, spiraling form of analysis-theory dialectic, and since my own films are the subject of my examination, I call it auto-theory. Let me begin with an example. In my video installation Nothing Is Missing (2006– 2010), 17 mothers of migrants, all living in different countries, explain in their own language what happened to their lives when one or more of their children decided to leave. We see a Mexican mother whose son left eight years ago and refuses to disclose his whereabouts out of fear of deportation, and a Tunisian mother whose son never told her of his plans to leave, until one phone call from the airport revealed to her what she had lost. The son was too afraid of her grief to tell her to her face. The videos consist of single-shot films in which these women tell their hitherto untold stories to someone close to them.1 Before anything else, these videos document a relationship, but not the one between maker and subject. The maker, here, is rather a facilitator, and the relationship that is documented, the one between the mother and someone close to her that has been modified by the migration of a child, is transformed in the process. The videos A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



Documenting What? Auto-Theory and Migratory Aesthetics

125

document this transformation itself, in the performance of it, on which more below. For now, I propose this installation as an “extreme” case of the potential for informing us on a deeper and more affective level that documentary holds (among other things). It changes the “what” of the content of documentary from events to the relationship itself. In my practice I have found generalizing this idea a helpful tool to approach social, political, and ethical questions. To put briefly how these questions translate into the practice, in this case, what happened is the following. After agreeing to collaborate in the project, the mother chooses a place in her house, the clothes she wants to be filmed in, and the person to whom she talks, always someone close to her. The maker sets up the shot, switches the camera on, and leaves the room. The single-shot video remains unedited. The mother sees the tape immediately after filming and agrees to the specific distribution conditions, in this case, as an artwork to be displayed in galleries and public spaces, not on television or Internet. In cases where she cries, falls silent for a while, or gets angry, I point these effects out, explain that I won’t take those moments out, and ask again if she has objections. My initial question, which has haunted me ever since I started to make documentaries, may sound naïve: what do documentaries document? On the basis of my own practice I contend, however, that this question remains relevant. I suggest that we can benefit epistemically and socially from a relationship of congruence between documentaries and the societal context in which they function qua documentation. Taking relationality as the key characteristic of both documentaries and social life in today’s essentially mixed societies will help us to deepen our understanding of the medium and its object: that which documentary documents is that double relationality. I had never thought much about the “of what?” question until I started to make documentaries. Intuitively I began to make films, the first one simply because something happened to a neighbor, and this compelled me to buy a camera in the hope I could be a witness to the blatant injustice perpetrated by the French state. I found some young artists interested in participating, and we traveled to France to meet the family and in-laws of my neighbor, now a friend. The project grew, the friendship deeper, the film longer, and the resulting 45-minute documentary Mille et un jours (A Thousand and One Days) seemed to just “happen.” It marked the start of the collective Cinema Suitcase and sparked the desire to make more films. Today, I continue to make films, mostly in collaboration with Michelle Williams Gamaker, the only other remaining member of the collective.2 At first, I took the film to be a document of something that scholars had not documented (enough) – the affective fabric of intimate life. But the density of the “slice of life” and the issues it raised became much greater. For reasons it took me a long time to understand, the films have ended up being received in the art world rather than in environments such as television. This is related to the kind of documentaries they are. It is not because they are “fictionalized” – they are not, and during the last decade, the art world has been keen on documentary works per se. On the contrary, the films are what a conference convener once called “extreme documentary” – a

126

Mieke Bal

phrase I like to use adjectivally, as “extremely documentary” films. My videos are “extreme” in their documentary nature, which I explain below as an adherence to the point of view and maximal empowerment of their “subjects.”3 Mille et un jours, for example, the first documentary I (co-)made, was immediately invited for an exhibition, entitled New Masculinities, at the Neue Berliner Kunstverein in 2005. This exhibition included documentary and fiction film and photography. We as makers found the choice of our film, which we considered to be essentially on migration, for the topic of the exhibition rather surprising, but in the end it turned out to be a very appropriate context for the film. Many details of the film do indeed question traditional masculine roles, or rather, Western prejudices about Arab men. Hence, after finishing the film, we continued to learn from it and about it. After a large solo exhibition in Tampere, Finland, in 2008, titled Going the Distance, and a smaller one in Murcia, Spain, in early 2011, called La última frontera (The Last Frontier), a large exhibition of all but one of my documentaries to date took place in October 2011 in Saint Petersburg. The title of that exhibition, Towards the Other, raises my initial question again: what do the films document? Is it that very move towards the other? Or do they in fact perform that move, thereby showing that documenting and performing are inseparable? My answer leans toward the latter. But saying that now is skipping several stages.

What, and For What? My work on migratory culture – both cinematic and academic – tries to achieve two seemingly contradictory goals: to celebrate the positive aspects of the cultural transformations that migration has brought about in Western culture, and to understand, and sympathize with, migrants and the difficulties they experience upon entering Western countries. The first goal essentially targets people who are used to living in Western culture, and perceive it as, until recently, monolithically “Western.” They are sometimes ill at ease with the mass migration that they mistakenly believe is a recent phenomenon. Foregrounding the conceptual, aesthetic, and sensual pleasures these transformations offer, the videos aim to encourage a positive, indeed festive, mood. My very first documentary, Mille et un jours, is the best example, because here the “subject” and its performance in film overlapped strongly. Mille et un jours (Figure 6.1) celebrates the successful attempt of a young sanspapiers to sort out his situation in France through marriage. Tarek came on a tourist visa from Tunisia in order to study. Due to some quirk in the administrative system we have never understood, he failed to get the student visa all his peers got, and he was in danger of being deported. This went so far that the afternoon before his registered marriage was to take place, the ceremony was canceled and the police started to hunt for Tarek. He tried a “paper marriage,” got an “arranged marriage,” and ended up being simply married – he and his bride referred to this last marriage as “the real marriage.” The marriage of the immigrant and his second-generation



Documenting What? Auto-Theory and Migratory Aesthetics

127

Figure 6.1  Video still from Mille et un jours (Mieke Bal, Zen Marie, Thomas Sykora, Gary Ward, and Michelle Williams Gamaker, 2004).

French-Tunisian bride is the temporal “now” of the film. The film was shot during the celebration of the young couple’s wedding, which was at the same time a celebration of their victory over state terror. As filmmakers, we were guests at the wedding. The family embraced us with total trust. That trust was the starting point: we were bound to reciprocate it. This was the first insight into what, for me, documentary is about; what it can do in contemporary society: build and mediate trust. The idea that as filmmakers we were guests, which had practical consequences regarding what we could film, also stimulated us to reflect on the question of what documentary documents. Trust is the ethical basis of documentary, fraught as it is with the risk of manipulation. For us, precisely by trust, by voluntarily yielding control – trusting us to make a documentary that would be truthful in their eyes – the family had surely earned their right to self-control! This is when we realized this project was about self-­ representation, hence, the power to influence the edits, and to control what they wished to say and what not, was theirs, by birthright, so to speak. We wanted the film to approximate, as much as possible, a “first-person” documentary without being one. (Lebow, 2012a) As a consequence, the so-called subjects, the people who populated the images, were actors who enacted themselves, their own stories, and determined what was going to be recorded. They chose to tell their stories to us, who had rapidly become friends, and although fully aware that the recordings were meant for a film that would have a wider audience, their engagement with the camera was personal, intimate, and confidential – features more typical of home video. What we celebrated together, in the end, was the way the film honored their celebration – the positive outcome of the main character’s long plight and the v­ ictory that empowered him as well as the community of which he was part.4

128

Mieke Bal

Figure 6.2  Video still from Lost in Space (Mieke Bal and Shahram Entekhabi, 2005).

The second goal of our documentaries is meant to contribute to a social climate that would benefit immigrants who feel they are met with suspicion, tension, or even outright hostility. Here, sympathy may help to change a reticent ambience into a hospitable one. This is visible in the darker moments in Mille et un jours, and becomes more central in Access Denied (2005) and State of Suspension (2008), which both deal with the conflict between Israel and Palestine where, in my view, paranoia towards the other is particularly strong. It is also central to Lost in Space (2005), a film that questions the dominance of English as the quintessential international language (Figure 6.2). In these films, too, the relationship between filmmakers and the people whose stories are being represented is primary, and overshadows the events on an anecdotal level. The provisional answer to my initial question, “what it is that is being documented?” would then be: the relationship between makers and subjects; and the answer to the question “what for?” – the question of the goal – would be the improvement of the relationship between the two and the different groups they represent. I am suggesting here that the “what?” and the “what for?” questions are intimately entwined. Indeed, they cannot be separated. The relationship between makers and subjects varies enormously, however, according to the situation that is being documented. The installation Nothing is Missing with which I began this essay is an extreme case that demonstrates what the main issues of relationality are. Here, the self-representation, although obviously also qualified by the circumstances of filmmaking, is emphatically made primary and performative. In other instances, the relationship documented is that among the subjects themselves. In Becoming Vera (2008), we followed a three-year-old girl in her travels through different countries, caught between two parents with very different backgrounds and ambitions. The child resisted the identity they, and the



Documenting What? Auto-Theory and Migratory Aesthetics

129

environment, attempted to impose on her, primarily through her imaginative relationships with very different people, situations, and stories. Small and thus dependent as she was, she often took over, telling us to follow her fantasies. For example, after talking about ghosts in a cemetery, she told us to come with her to see the ghost with whom she had struck up a friendship. Like most children, she used fiction to strengthen her sense of self. Deploying fragments of stories that have been read to her, she transformed those into her own vision. For example, sitting on her father’s knees in their home in Cameroon, she talks about pretty witches. Too quickly, her father fills in: “Like Snow White.” Vera resists: “They had colors in their hair. You have to see the story with me, I made it up.” Although the child is too young to decide upon a considered self-representation, she still manages to do so, and thus to determine the relationship between herself and her surroundings, including the filmmakers. Of course, the relationship made visible in the documentary can be less intimate and strong than that between parents and their children. In GLUB (Hearts) (2004), for example, the relationship documented is that between migrants and long-term residents of Berlin as it transforms aesthetically, sensorially, and politically through a changing relationship with the urban environment itself (Figure  6.3). Here, the people appearing on screen are many, and are not related to one another. Still, relationality remains a key issue, because the trust between makers and subjects must be constantly safeguarded.5 I propose, then, that in an ethical practice of documentary-making in and about an unequal world, the primary object of documenting can be considered to be relationship, and that the kind of documentary this entails is determined by the kind of relationship, its poles, and the way it is performed and transformed. This relationship, different as it will be according to circumstances, subject, and subject-matter or

Figure 6.3  Video still from GLUB (Hearts) (Mieke Bal and Shahram Entekhabi, 2004).

130

Mieke Bal

topic, will always account for what happens when one person documents the lived reality of another, and where possible, foreground that accounting. Secondarily, the situation documented, which largely determines that relationship, is a further object of documenting, but in my view and practice, only in the wake of the primary relationship. As a consequence, the question of documentary is no longer that of truth versus falsehood, spontaneity versus reenactment, reality versus fiction; nor that of categories of subject matter. The question of documentary resides in the performance of the relationship between maker and subjects. This primacy of relationship I advocate is not limited to documentary. Conversely, though, this documentary aspect permeates fiction as well. Thus, our more recent film, A Long History of Madness (2011), which is a fiction – it is enacted by actors, and contains impossible, unreal, and explicitly fictional figures and events – is also stubbornly documentary in two respects, which concern relationality. First, in an attempt to empower the subjects, most of the dialogue comes from real, historical sources. The psychoanalytic case histories staged are based on actual session notes, and the anachronistic figures of famous “madmen” deliver lines from “their” own texts. Second, the most overtly fictional, imaginative sequences are documentary takes of staged events, but they were not staged by us as filmmakers. Two social events – a festival in Turku, Finland and a carnival in Basel, Switzerland – show collective, socio-cultural fiction-making as a mode of addressing reality, in a documentary mode that refrains from intervening in the sense of staging. The film is overtly and explicitly fictional, but this aspect cannot be opposed to the “real” subject matter of documentary.6 Instead, documentaries can be considered and analyzed as films that foreground relationships that are always relevant in any film, including fiction films, but that, in the kind of documentaries I am discussing here, are the primary object that is being documented. This conception of documentaries facilitates a different understanding of the genre without undermining its most crucial characteristic, which is that it presents, and offers for understanding, documentation of something real. However, on this view the “what” of that documentation is relational rather than objective or monolithic, and as such, I would like to suggest through the notion of “congruence” mentioned at the beginning, a model of and for contemporary society, as well as of and for the social relevance of art. In the current social climate, this idea is a guideline for documentaries experimenting with forms of relationality, under the name of “migratory aesthetics.” My own position, as both a Westerner and a scholar, impacts on the kind of documentaries I feel able to make. With the term “auto-theory,” then, I indicate the relation between making, seeing, and analyzing documentaries as productive and useful.

Migratory Aesthetics The subject of all my documentaries is what I call “migratory culture.” The movement “towards the other,” as the title of the Saint Petersburg exhibition has it, implies a necessity to approach the making with openness to both form and content. The



Documenting What? Auto-Theory and Migratory Aesthetics

131

ethical obligation to avoid prescriptive content extends to the need to let subjects determine the way they present themselves and their stories. This has consequences for the filming and, where possible, the editing. In Mille et un jours, we went back to the family with several drafts, and the feedback they gave us was always incorporated. In the last eight years I have made what I call “experimental documentaries,” not so much on as with migrants, or about issues pertaining to migratory culture such as “mixed” identities, language, and the strictures of the law as it impinges on everyday life. With this phrase – not on but with – I am implicitly alluding both to Johannes Fabian’s attempt to explore social meaning in his book Power and Performance (1990), and with Trinh T. Minh-ha’s project of “filming alongside,” from her first film Reassemblage (1982) onward. It cannot be a “cinema of me,” a first-person-singular documentary, but a heterogeneous first-person-plural, where tasks are divided but collaboration replaces objectification.7 Migration is a movement of people with an often undetermined destination and duration. While I do not wish to circumscribe the migration from which “migratory” is derived with ontologically dubious definitions, it is not the same as tourism – voluntary, usually short-term travel with a return ticket. Nor can the experiences of exile and diaspora, or of politically or economically-driven displacements, be conflated in our understanding of those phenomena. In the context of this chapter, however, I consider the traces of migration of all these kinds of displacement together, as traces of the movement of people. It is through the effort of tracing those traces, so to speak, that relationality can be shaped and foregrounded even in documentaries set in public spaces with many different people. The space in which such traces occur is “migratory” – whether one is a migrant oneself or not. This is visible in, but not limited to, public spaces, while the degrees and forms of visibility also vary greatly.8 From the vantage point of the countries of arrival, it is never emphasized enough that the emergent mixed societies as a result of migration have benefited enormously from the arrival of people from different cultures. Cities have become more heterogeneous, music and cinema have been enriched, and philosophy productively harnesses the potential offered by thinking along the lines of – and through metaphors relating to – what I call “migrancy.” With this modification of the word I seek to move from the actual experiences of migration to a culture where movement is standard. These metaphors can be questioned for harboring an appropriation and idealization of the condition of migrancy. On the receiving end of the migratory culture of today, then, my documentaries embrace the enrichment that newcomers bring but at the same time attempt to avoid such naïvely positive gestures.9 Meanwhile migrants also change, so that their double relationship to host and home countries produces an aesthetic in and of itself, which, in turn, further contributes to changes in the host countries and their cultural expressions. My project is about the aesthetics – plural – that emerge from this situation; it is not, or not necessarily, about the theme of migration itself. In the exhibition 2MOVE, which was devoted to migratory culture and video art, some works were “about” migration, treating it as an urgent topic for reflection. Others brought the same sense of urgency to the exploration of the medium of video. Exhibited together they start

132

Mieke Bal

speaking to each other. For example, an abstract video by Roos Theuws that explored the difficulty of seeing and the participation of the unconscious therein, was juxtaposed to Mona Hatoum’s famous Measures of Distance (1988). By means of that juxtaposition Theuws’s allegedly purely aesthetic work gained levels of meaning that poignantly brought separation and danger to the foreground, whereas Hatoum’s masterly epistolary film (see Naficy, 2001) gained a more emphatic attention to conditions of visibility.10 The term I propose for the way documentaries concerning migratory culture can be fruitfully considered, especially those made not as “first-person” auto-documents but rather as intercultural encounters, is “migratory aesthetics.” Again, this term suggests congruence between the relationality in the making and that within the society from which the films emerge and which they serve, inflecting this relationality toward the specific domains of aesthetics and migrancy. In this phrase, I use “aesthetics” not so much as a philosophical domain, but rather as a term to refer, according to its Greek etymology, to a plural experience of sensate binding, a connectivity based on the senses. “Migratory” refers to the traces, equally sensate, of the movements of migration that characterize contemporary culture. Both terms are programmatic: different aesthetic experiences are offered through the encounter with such traces. Migratory aesthetics is an aesthetic of geographical mobility beyond the nation-state and its linguistic uniformity. Migratory aesthetics has a particularly overdetermined connection with the moving image.11 For those who perceive these movements, the people called migrants constitute, we could say, a moving image. Like video, they form images that move. The task of the filmmaker is to actualize, also, the connotative meaning of the verb, as in (emotional) moving. Take, for example, Spanish video-maker Gonzalo Ballester, who made a documentary based on relationality, Mimoune (2006). The relationality is both the motivation – Ballester’s desire to do something for a migrant friend – and the subject matter of his film. In line with Naficy’s (2001) claim about the epistolary nature of “third cinema,” in a move that turns metaphor and poetry into a literalized concretization, the artist made a video postcard or letter. He documents what Mimoune wants to say to his family, and takes it from the man who, paradoxically, cannot leave Spain, to his family in Morocco, and brings their greeting back to him. The authorship of the film is entirely Ballester’s, but the relationship between him and Mimoune is foregrounded as one of friendship. This epistolary act, a small gesture of friendship and an attempt to help, appears deceptively simple. When we realize that the artist filmed the act on different levels, what seemed an urgent form of simplicity becomes more complex. After a  shot of the sea in the wake of a boat – a key image in the visualization of ­migration – and a view of the houses in the Moroccan countryside, Mimoune sits down in front of the camera when saying his greetings. The family greets him back, also in front of the camera. The parties seem to have very little to say to each other. The point for them, clearly, is not what they say but that they speak and see each other. The point for the filmmaker may well have been to bring this limited “video agency” to visibility. It is the act of sending videos back and forth that is less



Documenting What? Auto-Theory and Migratory Aesthetics

133

the medium than the message itself. Thus, the epistolary aesthetic becomes thickened with layers of “video-agency.”12 The specific contribution that documentary as defined above, in terms of relationality, can make to the necessary affective improvement of migratory culture stems from the fact that looking at (moving) images is steeped in memory, guided by acts of remembering and forgetting. Memories of things seen, and of childhood experiences of pleasure and danger, infuse the viewing experience of anyone watching documentaries. Memory and the veil of forgetting that inevitably obscures or contradicts it is another key to migratory experience and its traces in the aesthetics of the migratory world. Memory in video often concerns someone else’s past, someone else’s m ­ emories, which as a viewer you cannot recall at all. These memories happen for the first time. Yet, they are inalienably anchored in the alter-memory or hetero-memory that the exposure to the film stages for us. This aspect makes such documentaries particularly apt for installation in exhibitions, where the viewer is master of her time, rather than, say, watching them on television where programmers set the clock.13 Samuel R. Delany (1995) writes on the installation aspect of video: Two characteristics that video shares with much contemporary art, especially installation art, are a lack of permanence – the “timelessness” that for so long had seemed essential to “serious” art – and movement – that motion in excess of the contained cycles and oscillations of the mobile, the sweep of movement and image that film, video, and certain large-scale mechanisms alone can provide.

In the context of my project, these two features merge. It is the movement that makes the images impermanent, again in the dual aspect of moving within the frame, or screen, and of displaying the movement resulting from the migratory aspect of culture, with the qualifier “(emotionally) moving” as mediator between the two. Everything changes constantly, the look of space as well as the look of the collectivity that constitutes the population of cities, sports events, restaurants, and streets. This impermanence is best captured on video, itself a medium of impermanence; and thus, video is emblematic as a medium fit to examine, understand, and relate to migratory culture.

Auto-Theory In order to learn about documentary-making and about migratory culture, about how to produce knowledge ethically and how to deploy film to do so, I consider films, including my own, as theoretical objects. Hubert Damisch, the creator of that term, explains in an interview with Yve-Alain Bois, that a “theoretical object”: obliges you to do theory but also furnishes you with the means of doing it. Thus, if you agree to accept it on theoretical terms, it will produce effects around itself … [and] forces us to ask ourselves what theory is. It is posed in theoretical terms; it produces theory; and it necessitates a reflection on theory.14

134

Mieke Bal

In the dynamic between the works as objects, their viewers, and the time in which these come together, accompanied by the social buzz that surrounds both, a compelling collective thought process emerges. Events of viewing are the sites of these thought processes, the tripartite theoretical activity Damisch mentions. In the case of documentaries, these thoughts inevitably concern the relation of modesty required when one seeks to gain knowledge about others; and, apart from “first-person” documentaries in the strict sense of filmmakers documenting their own life or situation, the so-called subjects of documentaries are by definition “other” to the maker herself. To put it succinctly, documenting migratory culture requires a care to avoid all the traps of intercultural analysis, such as exoticization, reduction of individuals to numbers and statistics, or an unqualified empathic approach that comes close to or indeed enacts emotional appropriation. My alternative approach is based on three premises. 1  Migration and/as movement. This premise requires an understanding of migratory culture as a culture of movement, best grasped in the moving image, as well as the ways the movement of images and the movement of people mutually ­illuminate each other; this was the tenet of the exhibition 2MOVE. 2  Art as “theoretical object.” Here we must understand works of art and other material artefacts as objects that can harbor, stimulate, and compel the development of thought; this reflects my academic view of the participation of artworks in the analysis one performs “on” them. 3  Auto-theory. Here I introduce the reflexive modality which allows me to reconsider my own theoretical convictions in view of encounters with otherness to which I am myself a party. The term “auto-theory” indicates a form of thinking that integrates my own practice of art making as a form of thinking, and reflecting on what I have made as a continuation of the making. These premises can only work because the videos are performative. They establish connections with people who are immersed in migratory culture but do not necessarily take critical distance from their own position in it. They are made in close collaboration with their “subjects” and deploy aesthetic experimentation in order to get closer to a shared understanding. It is in this process that the performativity can exert itself. Consider the aesthetics of everyday life in GLUB (Hearts), a 31-minute video and installation on changes in the “look” of Berlin under the influence of internationalization. This starting point is a truly, literally “bottom-up” exploration, beginning with the shells of sunflower seeds on the streets of the city, to the internationalization of the art world, which has done the city a world of good.15 Mimicry, a form of envious imitation famously brought to bear on colonial discourse by Homi Bhabha (1994), is this time practiced by the earlier residents who imitate the migrants’ habit of seed-eating. The results are far-reaching and much more incisive than the humble habit can account for. Documenting this practice of mimicry further enhances the phenomenon that hitherto had passed unnoticed, so that the practice formerly seen as foreign and even “dirty” becomes a new stylish



Documenting What? Auto-Theory and Migratory Aesthetics

135

habit, enviable and the subject of emulation. This helps along the unlearning of automatic contempt for foreignness and stimulates instead the enjoyment of novelty. Reflecting on this performativity made it possible to understand better the important contribution of “bottom-up” processes to the transformations in Western culture. Another example of the making of documentaries on the basis of my three premises is the experimental documentary Lost in Space (2004) on “routine violence” – the imposition of universalized English as the sole means of international communication. Reflecting on the experimental video, the analysis demonstrated to me – as maker and then practitioner of “auto-theory” – the pain of not being able to speak, yet being forced to do so; and facing the ethical requirement of cultural translation. Three connected thoughts occurred on the basis of the many statements made by the interviewees, put together as a film. First, there was the idea of “cultural translation,” not as a specific linguistic activity but as a process that takes place all the time instead. Second, in the face of the predominance of English around the globe and the subsequent apparent homogenization with built-in inequality – a trend that must be resisted – cultural translation is ethically bound to integrate a strong sense of foreignness that estranges viewers from this seemingly self-evident homogenization. Third, the way to achieve this resistance through the preservation of foreignness is to keep visible what translation theorist Lawrence Venuti calls “the remainder.” The strong presence of the remainder guarantees an aesthetic of cultural translation that is integral to but not identical with “migratory aesthetics.” The remainder consists of, so to speak, the traces after the described emulation has attempted to naturalize them.16 In the film, this form of migratory aesthetics is made tangible through a simple but radical intervention. The film is entirely based on the deepening of the discrepancy between sound and image. First, the speakers and interviewees are presented, with their names, professions, and provenance. Then, their statements are presented, both through voice and through large subtitles that traverse the entire frame. As a backdrop to these texts, which due to their scale work like slogans rather than subtitles, images of disturbing cityscapes of Berlin tell the story of the increasing xenophobia in Western European cities. These three levels of representation, kept apart rather than brought together in the normal cinematic synchronization, make the film experimental in more ways than one. It is formally different from the norm; it is un-unified and it refuses to pronounce.17 A third “case study” of auto-theory would be a reflection on the difficulty of visual representation in a cultural clash between iconophobia and iconophilia. An Irish filmmaker and a Palestinian student set out to film the latter on his first visit back home to Gaza (Access Denied, 2004). When Amsterdam doctoral student Ihab Saloul embarked on his first trip “home” to Gaza after four years of exile, he wanted to bring a witness. He thought there would be such dramatic changes that he said he could use two pairs of eyes to see it, and friendly support to bear it. Also, the changes he expected to see would make a record of the moment such as the filmmaker could provide, a useful aide-mémoire (Figure 6.4). That project stalled when filmmaker Gary Ward was denied access to Israel, for no other reason than that he held an Irish passport. Not that he would ever have

136

Mieke Bal

Figure 6.4  Video still from Access Denied (Mieke Bal, Thomas Sykora, and Gary Ward, 2004).

gotten into Gaza – in this sense the expectation of the project was naïve. This prohibition also amounted to a prohibition of the development of an intercultural friendship. This dual prohibition – to take sustenance in friendship and to record a fast-disappearing livable place called “home” – became a performative symbol of the difficulty of understanding across cultural divides. This impasse, then, rather than the filmed family reunion, became the subject of this film. The theoretical question, then, remains: are there any solutions other than cultural transgression to the difficulties of such representation? And to what extent do these solutions do justice to the difficulty itself? Rather than answering this question with a monolithic view that can only belie the complex reality, the film poses that question. Its form – a duality of imagery during the middle part of the film, where the images from Gaza, transferred from NTSC footage, alternate with, and are visibly different in quality than the ones where Gary kills his time waiting for his return flight as a tourist in Egypt – poses the insuperable quality of the conflict.18

Performing Contact Against All Odds To do “auto-theory” in this sense – to learn from making documentaries while challenging the traditional interpretation of the genre – it is inevitable to call on the notion of interdisciplinarity. Here, this notion is extended to comprise intermediality as well. My final example argues for a cautious deployment of interdisciplinarity in our thinking about documentary and the issues this “genre” can proffer.19 My example concerns psychology or, as is frequent in the humanities, the invocation of psychoanalysis. The first woman I filmed for the installation Nothing Is Missing, Tunisian



Documenting What? Auto-Theory and Migratory Aesthetics

137

Massaouda Mehdi, offers a striking instance of a culturally specific reluctance that cautions us against psychologizing or psychoanalyzing her. Not coincidentally, this is at the most explicitly performative moment of the video. The situation is this: Massaouda and her new daughter-in-law, Ilhem Ben-Ali Mehdi, get along very well indeed. But in their relationship remains the stubborn gap that immigration policies have dug. When Ilhem married Massaouda’s youngest son in Sens, France, the mother was not allowed to attend the wedding: the French authorities had denied her a visa to travel from Tunisia to France. Hence, not only had Massaouda not been in a position to meet Ilhem before the wedding, to witness who she was, but even more egregiously, she had not been able to fulfill her maternal role as her culture prescribes it, which is to help her son choose his bride. At some point, Ilhem ends up asking with some insistence what Massaouda had thought of her when they first met, after the choice had been made without her and she had been unable to have a say in the matter.20 First, Massaouda does not answer, which makes Ilhem anxious enough to push the question: did she find her ugly, plain? The older woman looks away at this point. The young woman insists. We will never know what Massaouda “really” felt, but the power that the filming bestows on her, as if in compensation for her earlier disempowerment, is to either withhold or give her approval. She does the latter, but only after some teasing. When I saw the tape and understood the speech I was convinced Ilhem would normally never have been allowed to ask this question and thus vent her anxiety – an intuition she later confirmed. Hence, Ilhem was empowered by the filmic situation as well. As for the mother, she was given and then exercised the power she had been denied, and she used it to first mark the gap, then to help her somewhat insecure daughter-in-law (Figure 6.5).21

Figure 6.5  Video still with Massaouda Mehdi from Nothing Is Missing (Mieke Bal, 2006–2010).

138

Mieke Bal

“We” – global, mostly Western, adult viewers – can easily relate to this moment. This potential for identification helps us overcome the tendency to “othering.” Such insecurity, for example, can easily be construed as universal, with the unconscious as provenance. This interaction between Massaouda and Ilhem is, however, thoroughly social, performative, as well as culturally specific (to migratory culture, not Tunisian or Arab), but also bound to the medium of video – to the making of the film. Whether or not there is something in Ilhem’s childhood as the oldest daughter of migrant parents that has made her insecure, what matters is that the situation of migration directly gave both women cause to enact this moment. The scene does not allow for a universalizing psychoanalytic interpretation. That would not only be futile, but it would be overstepping the bounds of the modesty the relationship of trust required. Precisely because the trust lifted all limitations of access, the compulsory other side must be modesty. It would also overlook the cultural constraints that enabled the conversation, and the migratory alterations that allowed for its excesses, or “remainders.” As a maker I did not have any influence on this occurrence – it was not my “intention”; I was not even there when it happened. We cannot construe it either as a ­realistic, documentary moment in the sense of Richard Brilliant’s Gadamerian ­analysis of portraiture (1991), where an “occasion” was recorded – it would never have happened outside of the situation of video-making. Thus, it contradicts and suspends the universalizing myths of realism and documentary “truth,” thereby bracketing common views of documentary itself as well.22 This moment goes against the traditional expectations regarding documentary. At the same time, it is “extremely documentary” in nature, because it is in the documenting itself that it happened. There would never have been an external reality the film could have documented. It is a moment, in other words, that was staged, yet real, thus thoroughly challenging that distinction. We cannot pinpoint a psyche offering symptoms for interpretation. For this to happen there was, instead, a need for a culturally specific relationship between two women related by marriage and separated by the gaps of migration, and for a relationship to the medium that allowed the women to overstep cultural boundaries. If, after this realization, the potential for identification with a young woman’s insecurity remains actualized, so much the better. Thus, I felt compelled to extend my willful abandon of mastery from the filming to the editing, to the installation, and to the critical discourse I am offering – the reflection on what I have learned from this experimental filmmaking. An installation of voices, intermingling and alone, and of faces facing women none of them has ever seen: I did this, but I could not master how I did it. I did not edit the tape, left translating it to the people concerned, and relied on local curators for the installations of this project.23 The making of art, in other words, is not an instance, an example to illustrate an academic point, nor an elevated form of cultural expression. Instead of these two things, which are equally problematic for a productive confrontation with the alleged otherness of migratory culture, it is a form of facilitation, so that things can happen



Documenting What? Auto-Theory and Migratory Aesthetics

139

in intercultural contact that would not easily occur otherwise. I propose the validity of the performance in its non-universal singularity, including, for instance, the moment of slight tension between Massaouda and Ilhem. The performative moment is the product of an act of filmmaking that required the absence, or in other cases, passivity of the filmmaker.24 Of course, this yielding is itself still steeped in a position of power. But this is not opposed to the power held by the participants. For, it also required the willful surrender of the two women to the apparatus standing between them and its cultural status. This surrender entailed a cultural transgression – to ask, and insist on, a question that would be unspeakable in the culture of origin. This, more than her linguistic pronunciation of Arabic as a second language, is Ilhem’s “accent,” in the sense in which Hamid Naficy (2001) evocatively uses that term. The “accent” emblematizes the productive, innovative, and enriching potential of intercultural, that is, migratory life. In this case, it could occur thanks to the absence of the filmmaker – but also of the two husbands – and the situation of displacement for both women. This interaction – between the people performing and the critic reflecting on how to understand what they did – happened outside of any psychological pressure, and should not be reframed in a psychoanalytic context, for example, that would stifle the beauty of it. This is as useful a lesson for a scholar interested in interdisciplinarity as any. It takes us out of the somewhat despairing “anything goes” posture that the flag of interdisciplinarity seems to cover too often (and which the use of the indifferent term “multidisciplinarity” betrays). The insight is the result of the shift from an essentialist concept of culture as static to a performative, confrontational concept of what we are better off calling “the cultural.” In this adoption of Fabian’s concept of culture as a process of contestation (2001), and in analogy to Mouffe’s distinction between politics and the political (2005), I see a possibility to articulate an intimate cultural dynamic in the globalized world: the intercultural, then. This adds a retrospective gloss on the contrasting out-of-sync-ness as aesthetic principle in Lost in Space. Massaouda’s and Ilhem’s performance of intercultural contact was done on the basis of a close collaboration of the face and the word. Indeed, the spoken word is central to a performance of contact across divisions as well as to the installation. The word is deployed in an attempt to turn a condescending act of “giving voice” into an affirmation of our need to be given that voice. More directly than film, video binds the images we see to the sounds we hear. In Nothing Is Missing, that sound is primarily and almost exclusively the human voice and the spoken words it utters. Speech, then, becomes the occasion for a positive deployment of interdisciplinarity, one that operates through intermediality. To underline its importance regardless of the question of languages and their understandability, translations of the women’s speeches are foregrounded in two ways. One foregrounding of translation is the placement of subtitles as “supra-titles,” above the faces. Thus, I seek to emphasize the importance of speech in relation to the face – it is easier to read and see in this way. Second, idiomatic phrases are translated literally as long as they can be understood. This is to foreground the “remainder”;

140

Mieke Bal

and conversely, the fact that English is a tool, a prosthesis the viewer needs, rather than the “natural” language it is so often seen to be. This makes the discrepancy ­between sound and image in Lost in Space more meaningful, and certain translation decisions in the other films become part of an aspect of documentary – to document relationality itself – that is more striking. Through these examples I would like to propose the effectivity of documentary, not to get at the truth but to achieve perceptual change: in the making, in the viewing, in the reflection. In each example discussed here a different issue arises that bears on academic questions, on issues of the medium and of documentary as a genre, as much as on social ones. It is the refusal to separate these three domains as different “levels” that informs my thinking about documentary. Lately, this practice has been recognized as such, when the 2011 exhibition of these films in the Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg was not only titled after the effort to make and consider documentary as performative of relationality – Towards the Other – but also, since it was commissioned and organized by an institute belonging to a university, seen as academically, as much as artistically, relevant.25 If documentaries are meant to document something, the object of documentation is not, or not necessarily, the situation described. They are also, simultaneously, agents of the act of documenting as well as of the point of doing so, rather than documents of a slice of reality. It seems obvious that the act of documenting a social situation is performatively invested in producing change in that situation – perceptual, conceptual, political, and indeed behavioral. The question is how that change might be produced. In my view – and in my practice – this is not, as might be expected, by describing, and where necessary, indicting a situation of which the public, once properly informed, is hoped to change its opinion. An endeavor like this, while sometimes useful in fields such as journalism, might also come close to propaganda. Instead, the practice of filming itself, with its aspects of encounter and contact, performs the change. It is this change that, once visible, entices viewers to participate and expand that change to their own lives. This, I speculate, is why the films have found their outlet in art circuits, rather than in those information circuits like television where journalism is the primary model and knowledge the goal. However, to allude to a phrase Freud used to explain the workings of psychoanalysis, insight alone can never be enough.

Notes 1 For more on this project, see Bal (2012). 2 Cinema Suitcase consisted of three other members: Zen Marie, Thomas Sykora, and Gary Ward. The collective may have dispersed due to migratory events, but its mode of collective filmmaking has had a decisive influence on Michelle’s and my practices of making. For information on my own documentaries, see http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/films; for Michelle’s other video work, see http://www.michellewilliamsgamaker.com/works.html.



Documenting What? Auto-Theory and Migratory Aesthetics

141

3 The phrase “extremely documentary” was used in an invitation letter from Mark Reinhardt for a conference of documentary makers in 2006. I immediately took to it, feeling it explains quite precisely the paradoxes of my work. The title Towards the Other was primarily chosen for its translatability into Russian. But for my purpose here, it does express an indication of what is at stake in documentary-making. When I write “solo exhibition,” I refer to shows where I was personally asked to select the films to be included. Obviously, since filmmaking is never a solo activity and I have nearly always worked with others, there are by definition multiple authors involved. All information on co-authors is on the website (see n. 2). 4 Home video is characteristically profoundly different from other forms of video in that the subjects respond, not to the camera but to the person behind the camera. See Moran (2002). Of all my documentary works, Separations (2009) is the most clearly based on a home-video aesthetic. The film explores the havoc wrought by transgenerational traumatization in a migrant family where the specter of the Holocaust still lingers. 5 On Becoming Vera, see Bal (2009). GLUB (Hearts) is both a film and a larger video installation consisting of eight screens, props, and the film itself. On this project, see Bal (2005) and Aydemir (2008). 6 For this project, which also comprises exhibitions, see www.crazymothermovie.com and http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/exhibitions/landscapes-of-madness. 7 With Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro, I have curated a traveling group exhibition that explored the different meanings of the notion of “migratory culture” for filmmaking. The videos in the exhibition all played with, but could not be captured under the label of documentary. The exhibition catalogue includes a DVD which contains clips of all the works. See Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro (2008). For a discussion of first person singular and plural, see Alisa Lebow (2012a). 8 For a very helpful analysis of the definitions of these terms, see James Clifford (1997: 244–278). On tourism, see Jonathan Culler (1988: 153–167). On invisible, hard-tonotice, and emerging traces, see Bal (2005). 9 For migration and cinema, see Hamid Naficy (2001). For migrancy and philosophy, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1988). For an incisive critique of naïvely positive gestures, see Inge E. Boer (2006). Paul Patton (2006) offers an understanding of Deleuze’s – but not his followers’ – use of notions such as nomadism and migration as not metaphoric. 10 2MOVE was such an exhibition of videos speaking to one another (Bal and HernándezNavarro, 2008). The 2012 exhibition Estranjerías in MUAC, Mexico City, in which I participated, is another example. That exhibition was curated by Néstor García Canclini and Andréa Giunta. 11 The notion of aesthetics as sensorial engagement is loosely derived from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1970). The connection between the movement of people and the moving image, on which 2MOVE was based, is more generally discussed. See, e.g., Kaes (1998) and, analyzed in more detail, Lebow (2012b). 12 For the idea of an epistolary aesthetic, see Naficy (2001). For this video, see http://www. gonzaloballester.com/?page_id=9, accessed July 22, 2014. 13 On this conception of memory as a politically active intervention in the present, see Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro (2012). 14 Bois, Hollier, and Krauss (1998: 8). Damisch’s concept of the theoretical object sometimes seems to suggest these are objects around which theories have been produced.

142

15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25

Mieke Bal At other times, as in the interview quoted here, he attributes to the artwork the capacity to motivate, entice, and even compel thought. It is this meaning of the term that I endorse. On this project, see Murat Aydemir (2008: 7–25). The benefits of the internationalization of the art world do not, of course, neutralize the problems (such as exploitation, undue generalizations, and tokenism) that accompany this phenomenon as well. See Lawrence Venuti (1994: 214–215; 1995; and, for the depth of the consequences of this view, 1996). On Lost in Space, see my “auto-theoretical” essay (Bal, 2007). On cultural translation in general, see Mieke Bal and Joanna Morra (2007). On the many issues pertaining to Palestinian cultural memory, see Saloul’s analysis (2012). In another video, State of Suspension, we approached the conflict through comedy, in an attempt to break out of the routine indictments and effectuate a stronger impact on the viewer. The question of interdisciplinarity is too complex to broach here. See my article on  this through a work by video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila (Bal, 2011c); and on the issue more in general my book Thinking in Film (2013). When Massaouda was denied a visa to attend her son’s wedding – the one central in Mille et un jours – I decided to visit her, and this was the beginning of the project. The situation is further explored through Mille et un jours in Bal (2011a). For a more complex view of portraiture, see Ernst van Alphen (2005: 21–47). This yielding has in fact fine-tuned the project as it developed. Each installation taught me more about the local migratory culture in the country where the installation took place. At the same time, the unpredictable “look” of the installation also “documents” the constant transformation and the local–global tension in each of the cultural settings. Perhaps it is useful for some readers to recall the basic three sources of this concept of performativity: John Austen, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler. For an excellent account, see Jonathan Culler (2006: 137–165). See the catalogue (Veits, 2011). I am deeply grateful to the director of the NIP, Mila Chevalier, for her initiative that broke the boundary between academic and artistic projects.

References Alphen, Ernst van (2005) Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aydemir, Murat (2008) Piecemeal Translation. In Cherry, Deborah (ed.) About Mieke Bal, pp. 7–25. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Bal, Mieke (2005) Food, Form, and Visibility: GLUB and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Postcolonial Studies, 8(1), 51–77. Bal, Mieke (2007) Lost in Space, Lost in the Library. In Durrant, Sam and Lord, Catherine (eds.) Essays in Migratory Aesthetics, pp. 23–36. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bal, Mieke (2009) Becoming of the World versus Identity Politics. Nordlit: Tidsskrift i ­litteratur og kultur, 24, 9–30. Bal, Mieke (2011a) A Thousand and One Voices. In Baggesgaard, Mads Anders and Ladegaard, Jakob (eds.) Confronting Universalities: Aesthetics and Politics under the Sign of Globalisation, pp. 269–304. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.



Documenting What? Auto-Theory and Migratory Aesthetics

143

Bal, Mieke (2013) Thinking in film: The Politics of Video Installation According to Eija-Liisa Ahtila. London: Bloomsbury. Bal, Mieke (2011c) Mektoub: When Art Meets History, Philosophy, and Linguistics. In Repko, Allen F., Newell, William H., and Szostak, Rick (eds.) Case Studies in Interdisciplinary Research, pp. 91–122. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bal, Mieke (2012) Facing Intimacy Across Divisions. In Pratt, Geraldine and Rosner, Victoria (eds.) The Global and the Intimate: Essays Toward a 21st Century Transnational Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press. Bal, Mieke and Hernández-Navarro, Miguel Á. (eds.) (2008) 2MOVE: Video, Art, Migration. Murcia, Spain: Cendeac. Bal, Mieke and Morra, Joanna (eds.) (2007) Acts of Translation. Special issue, Journal of Visual Culture, 6(1). Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb (1970) Aesthetica [1750]. Hildesheim: Olms. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Boer, Inge E. (2006) Uncertain Territories: Boundaries in Cultural Analysis, ed. Mieke Bal, Bregje van Eekelen, and Patricia Spyer. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bois, Yve-Alain, Hollier, Denis, and Krauss, Rosalind (1998) A Conversation with Hubert Damisch. October, 85, 3–17. Brilliant, Richard (1991) Portraiture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James (1997) Diasporas. In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century, pp. 244–278. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Culler, Jonathan (1988) The Semiotics of Tourism. In Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions, pp. 153–167. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Culler, Jonathan (2006) The Performative. In The Literary in Theory, pp. 137–165. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Delany, Samuel R. (1995) High Involvement. In London, Barbara (ed.) Video Spaces: Eight Installations. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press. Fabian, Johannes (1990) Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations Through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Fabian, Johannes (2001) Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hernández-Navarro, Miguel Á. (2012) Materializar el pasado. El artista como historiador (benjaminiano). Murcia, Spain: Micromegas. Kaes, Anthony (1998) Leaving Home: Film, Migration, and the Urban Experience. New German Critique, 74, 179–192. Lebow, Alisa (2012a) Introduction. The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary, pp. 1–11. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Lebow, Alisa (2012b) The Camera as Peripatetic Migration Machine. In The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary, pp. 219–232. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Moran, James M. (2002) There is No Place Like Home Video. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mouffe, Chantal (2005) On the Political. New York and London: Routledge. Naficy, Hamid (2001) An Accented Cinema: Exile and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

144

Mieke Bal

Patton, Paul (2006) Mobile Concepts, Metaphor, and the Problem of Referentiality in Deleuze and Guattari. In Margaroni, Maria and Yiannopoulou, Effie (eds.) Metaphoricity and the Politics of Mobility, pp. 27–46. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Saloul, Ihab (2012) Catastrophe and Exile in the Modern Palestinian Imagination: Telling Memories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Veits, Maria (ed.) (2011) Towards the Other. Exhibition catalogue. Saint Petersburg: Netherlands Institute in Saint Petersburg. Venuti, Lawrence (1994) Translation and the Formation of Cultural Identities. Current Issues in Language and Society, 1, 214–215. Venuti, Lawrence (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence (1996) Translation, Philosophy, Materialism. Radical Philosophy, 79, 24–34.

Part III

Work

Introduction Work

Silke Panse

“There should be a difference between the employed and the unemployed, since a worker gets paid at the end of the month,” says a Congolese about the palm plantation workers in the artist documentary Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (Renzo Martens, 2009). But they are not able to live even though they work all the time: “We work hard. But we’re not making any money.” Things are not getting better, quite the reverse. Increasingly, working does not suffice to support living. The causal link between working and generating an income that ensures that the worker can continue to work in order to generate surplus profit for their employer has become weaker. Interest rates on capital, selling shares, or property make more profit than can be had from working. Oxfam states that “for the first time, more working households [are] in poverty than non-working ones” (Elliott, 2014). But not only has “working” been separated from a living wage, “work” has also been detached from the status of being “a worker.” Globally, workers on a contract are made redundant and then rehired under worse conditions and without a contract (Watt, 2014). In the economies of developing and developed nations many people work, without being employed, forever in unpaid internships, particularly in the art economies (Steyerl, 2011: 34). The culture industries are fueled through “free,” that is, unwaged, labor and work. In the industries that produce material goods for our leisure, workers die in order to produce garments in Bangladesh (Young, 2013) or football stadiums in Qatar (Pattison, 2013; Booth, 2013). In this context and that of human trafficking, whether for sexual or other exploitation of labor, the term “slave” has been reintroduced for a worker without rights, agency, or pay. In the service industries of the first world workers commit suicide because of ­deteriorating working conditions. A climate in which a A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

148

Silke Panse

CEO can enforce redundancies with a statement such as: “I’ll do it in one way or the other, by the window or by the door,” leads to suicides “directly linked to work” (Willsher, 2014). The police maintain a higher moral ground when they formally investigate the company director for moral harassment. The effects on the workers are not only psychological; management harassment attacks “their physical and mental health” (Willsher, 2014). As there is more work for fewer workers, workers continue to be replaced by managers, and become either unemployed or self-employed. Not only the gap between the rich and the poor, but also that between genders has widened with respect to work, for example in the film industry (Pulver, 2014). In Once Upon a Time Proletarian (Xiaolu Guo, 2009) the gender hierarchy and the definition of workers as male, under communism, is revealed when an old Chinese peasant complains that the workers in his village are now so poor that they “can’t even afford a prostitute.” In Birmingham (UK), female cleaners, caterers, and care staff won an equal pay court case against the city, which had paid male waste disposal workers four times as much for the same pay-graded labor (Press Association, 2012). Being self-employed has increasingly become a euphemism for precarious labor, zero-hours contracts, and being underpaid. It is a shift in nomenclature that the job center encourages in order to reduce the numbers of unemployed in their statistics: “the rise in self-employed individuals … has coincided with a fall in employee numbers” (Fisher, 2014). The term is now frequently put in inverted commas: “Many ‘self-employed’ women get by on less than £10,000 a year” (Fisher, 2014). In the United Kingdom, they earn “40% less than self-employed men.” The so-called immaterial labor of care-work has “seen some of the fastest growth in self-employment, which worsens working conditions for women already on poverty wages” (Fisher, 2014). Rather than being entrepreneurs, these “self-employed” are four times as much in debt than the employed (Fisher, 2014). The shift from employment in institutions to variable states of self-­ employment in which “one is never finished with anything” (Deleuze, 1992: 5) has been described as that from the disciplinary society (Foucault, 1977) to the societies of control: “in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure … day care could at least express new freedom, but they could as well participate in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements” (Deleuze, 1992: 4). Documentary images do not just observe this state of things as bystanders. Apart from universities and public museums, cinema chains frequently employ their workers on zero-hours contracts (Public and Commercial Services Union, 2013; Neville, 2013). Film workers are paid diminishing or sub-subsistence wages in some countries, because having such a job is at least more meaningful than stacking shelves or no job. The production and distribution of documentary images contributes as well to ever more precarious working conditions. While on the one hand making a documentary has become easier, what used to be the image production of a documentarian employed by a broadcasting

Introduction 149 company or funded through corporate or state funding, is now often the result of unpaid leisure. When we look at and post documentary images online, we are part of the casualization of the film worker. With the individualization of image production has come the simultaneous dissolution of jobs and film worker unions. The increased popularity of documentary and the restructuring of film production in favor of documentary could be seen as another effect of the intensified pressure on flexibility (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005: 217) of who works in and for documentary images. Boltanski and Chiapello observe how, following the critique of inauthentic consumerism in the last century, “authentic goods and human relations” are now supplied “in the form of commodities” (443). If, in order to “meet demands for authenticity: consumers would henceforth be offered products that were ‘authentic’” (442), is then documentary not such a product? The demand for authenticity of behavior in the spirit of present-day capitalism matches the conditions of documentary perfectly. The organization of work has become more focused on multitasking, self-control, and autonomy (218). With respect to the organization of film, these requirements are epitomized by documentary. Especially first-person documentary seems to fulfill what Boltanski and Chiapello describe as “a project of self-realization” that links “the cult of individual performance and extolment of mobility to reticular conceptions of the social bond” (217). As self-­employed ­autobiographical documentarians multitask between filming and being filmed, they cannot go on strike like waged laborers. What Boltanski and Chiapello have witnessed as a “dismantling of the world of work” (217) could also be seen as a dismantling of the world of fiction film labor. Only the demarcated activity of acting can be paid. The operations of the labor market are based on an “essential legal fiction” (131). Perhaps the boundaries of fiction are necessary to separate the labor of acting from the labor of being. In a fiction film, there is a vertical structure of labor which ensures that ideas move through all the stages into the end product. Being in a documentary – or to be a worker in a documentary – is not a job. Documentary protagonists are not regarded as film workers. Being in a reality television show at least obliges a longer-term commitment of employment. The world of work has changed since Frederick Wiseman first observed the processes of working in institutions, and since Bill Nichols described “social actors” as “individuals, or ‘characters,’ acting their normal social roles” (Nichols, 1978: 17). Wiseman’s documentaries such as Titicut Follies (1967), High School (1968), Hospital (1970), Basic Training (1971), Near Death (1989), Ballet (1995), High School II (1994), and Domestic Violence (2001) can be situated in the context of the previous disciplinary society, in which the identity of the worker was “defined by different places and different times of life: one was mother or father at home, worker in the factory, student at school, inmate in prison, and mental patient in the asylum” (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 331). The subjects in a Wiseman documentary are always at a site, be that of work or leisure, and observational documentary is based on the idea that work is visible and audible, and that we can see and hear it.

150

Silke Panse

“We are in a general crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure – prison, hospital, factory, school, family” wrote Deleuze in 1990 (1992: 3–4). Further, “everyone knows that these institutions are finished” (4). The societies of control have taken the place of the disciplinary society of closed systems; “the corporation replaces the factory” and continuous control the examination (5): “the man of control is … in a continuous network” (6). Although work in institutions still exists in contemporary societies of control, what was once a relatively coherent context of “the social” in which individuals performed roles, has mutated into what Boltanski and Chiapello call the “connextionist” or networking world that is plagued by an “unease about how to formulate the question of authenticity” (424). The role does not exist for the social actor to fill, but “beings alter themselves according to the situation they encounter” (412). In a “network organization, the qualities of persons and the qualities of jobs are mutually defined in the relationship. … But in such a set-up, labor can no longer be treated as a commodity separate from the person of those performing it” (131). Meanwhile, in Enjoy Poverty, the plantation owner holds up beautifully lit and aesthetically pleasing documentary images of his factory: “It’s hard to see. It’s artistic. It’s not about showing the factory.” In these photos, already the material working conditions in the enclosed environment of a factory are invisible and the documentary aesthetics serve the employer. Even with respect to manual labor, to document the relation between the work, the economies of production, and how much of life work pays for, has always been difficult. Brecht famously objected nearly a century ago that a photo of a factory does not tell us anything about the institution (2000: 164). His objection that “a simple ‘reproduction of reality’ says less than ever about reality itself ” (164) in these times of already invisible, immaterial labor (Lazzarato, 1996) says even less than ever about reality. Documentary has frequently been narrated in terms of a progressive commitment to change (Waugh, 1984; Waugh, Winton, and Baker, 2010) and as revolutionary or radical (Kleinhans, 1984; Gaines, 2007), but the question of whether visibility and audibility are in the interest of the workers in the image has to be assessed anew in each case. After following his subjects from the state socialism of the German Democratic Republic to the capitalism of the Federal Republic of Germany in the documentary series The Children of Golzow (1961–2007), the ­documentarian Winfried Junge observed: as East Germans, they were not able to speak out against their government, as West Germans, they cannot criticize their employer (Panse, 2008: 69). The question of whether a documentary works for the employer, the filmmaker, or the worker is explored in Silke Panse’s chapter, who ­suggests aesthetic means as protection for the worker, but also that the worker in the image is immanent to its aesthetics and contributes to them. The manual labor of the protagonist in what she calls land documentary not only shapes the land, but also the image, so the aesthetics of the documentary image are directly dependent on the material labor of the documentary protagonist. In Ewa Mazierska’s chapter, the “workers” are safe from employer backlash, because they are non-actors acting as workers and the film is not a documentary that observes a given situation. Set in neo-capitalist Serbia where a factory is closed  down, Želimir Žilnik’s Old School Capitalism (Serbia, 2009) explores a cross-section of

Introduction 151 issues around work in ­post-socialism. The film is not only embroiled in worker’s struggles, but also in a dialectic between documentary and fiction – one perceived as secondary to reality, the other as directing it. The staging of reality assumed a different dynamic under communism, where the ­ideology was intended to shape reality. For Marx, “the dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely ­scholastic question” (Marx, 1969). Presumably then, the reality or non-reality of documentary that is isolated from the praxis of creating facts would also be academic. The following essays display diverse relations between the worker, the work, and the image. Work is not a medium or even work-specific any more. As work is no longer confined to a specific place, and documentary work and the work in documentary cannot be so easily isolated from their material and immaterial context, symptomatically, two of the essays in the work section are written by non-­ documentary scholars. In response to the ongoing dissolving of the ­boundaries of work, these essays move in and out of the documentary frame, even as they go deeper into the image, as is the case with Panse’s chapter. This extends the notion of the worker, beyond those represented in the image, to the workers of the image. Anna Ward on the other hand defends a more traditional, representational approach of what Jacques Rancière disparages as “the p­ edagogical model of the efficacy of art” (2010: 13). Ward suggests that the representation of sex workers, whose status as workers is contested (Osborne, 2013; Thompson, 2013), is relevant for claiming sex work as work, to better working conditions and for the forming of their self-image. Both Panse and Ward explore work that is not usually regarded as such. The documentary images by workers of each other in Leaves Fall in All Seasons (Ahmed Mater, Saudi Arabia, 2013) are not discussed in the subsequent essays. The footage was shot by migrant workers on their mobile phones and transferred directly to Mater’s mobile or uploaded to YouTube. It is addressed to their friends and families and shows what the workers want to present of themselves. Shot on building sites in Mecca either from great heights or while taking down high-rise towers with ropes in close proximity with the crashing down buildings, the images reveal the physically precarious conditions of the workers who filmed them. Despite the fact that the workers are building signifiers of religious transcendence, these images do not evoke the sublime. This is in contrast to Werner Herzog’s ­documentary of workers trying to extinguish the burning oil fields in the aftermath of the first Iraq war in Lessons of Darkness (1992), for the success of which, and in order to generate a contrast of incomprehension, the separation of the ­filmmaker from the worker was vital. The disparity between the beautiful appearance of the oil fields which look like lakes, and the treacherous reality that they are oil, evokes the sublime filmed by Herzog from the safe position of a plane. The physical vulnerability of the workers in Leaves Fall in All Seasons is perhaps more like in Herzog’s earlier film, La Soufrière – Waiting for an Inevitable Disaster (1977), where he seeks out a volcano that is about to erupt when most of the local population has been evacuated. But the inevitable disaster eventually is evitable for the filmmaker who had voluntarily put himself in this threatening situation, in contrast to workers who are forced to do so in order to make a living. As Leaves Fall in All

152

Silke Panse

A worker filmed by a colleague from a physically equally precarious position in Leaves Fall in All Seasons (Ahmed Mater, 2013).

Seasons directly positions the filming workers with respect to the images, it ­immediately raises the question of their safety and is a perilious step forward in documenting contemporary labor.

References Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. G. Elliott. London and New York: Verso. Booth, R. (2013) Qatar World Cup Construction “Will Leave 4,000 Migrant Workers Dead.” The Guardian, September 26, http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/ sep/26/qatar-world-cup-migrant-workers-dead, accessed July 23, 2014. Brecht, B. (2000) Brecht on Film and Radio. London: Methuen.

Introduction 153 Deleuze, G. (1992) Postscript to the Societies of Control. October, 59, 3–7. Elliott, L. (2014) Britain’s Five Richest Families Worth More Than Poorest 20%. The Guardian, March 17, http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/mar/17/oxfam-report-scale-britaingrowing-financial-inequality, accessed July 23, 2014. Fisher, L. (2014) Many “Self-Employed” Women Get By on Less Than £10,000 a Year. The  Observer, March 8, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/08/womenself-employed-gender-pay-gap-jobs, accessed July 23, 2014. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Gaines, J.M. (2007) The Production of Outrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition. Framework 48(2), Fall, 36–55. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kleinhans, C. (1984) Forms, Politics, Makers, and Contexts: Basic Issues for a Theory of Radical Political Documentary. In Waugh (ed.) Show Us Life: Toward a History and Aesthetics of Committed Documentary, pp. 318–42. New York: Metuchen, and London: Scarecrow Press. Lazzarato, M. (1996) Immaterial Labor. In Virno, P. and Hardt, M. (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy, pp. 132–146. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Marx, K. (1969) Theses on Feuerbach [1845]. In Marx/Engels Selected Works, vol. 1, trans. W. Lough, pp. 13–15. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Neville, S. (2013) Curzon and Everyman Cinema Staff on Zero-Hours Contracts. The Guardian, August 9, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/09/curzon-everymancinema-staff-zero-hours, accessed July 23, 2014. Nichols, B. (1978) Fred Wiseman’s Documentaries: Theory and Structure. Film Quarterly, 31(2), 15–28. Osborne, L. (2013) Why Germany Is Now “Europe’s Biggest Brothel.” The Guardian, June 12, http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/jun/12/germany-now-europes-­ biggest-brothel, accessed July 23, 2014. Panse, S. (2008) Collective Subjectivity in The Children of Golzow vs. Alienation in “Western” Interview Documentary. In Austin, T. and De Jong, W. (eds.) Rethinking Documentary, pp. 67–81. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Pattison, P. (2013) Revealed: Qatar’s World Cup “Slaves.” The Guardian, September 25, http:// www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/revealed-qatars-world-cup-slaves, accessed July 23, 2014. Press Association (2012) Women Who Worked for Birmingham Council Win Equal Pay Court Fight. The Guardian, October 24, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/oct/ 24/women-birmingham-council-pay-court, accessed July 23, 2014. Public and Commercial Services Union (2013) Gallery Staff in Zero Hours Protest at Tate Modern, November 25, http://www.pcs.org.uk/en/news_and_events/news_centre/index. cfm/gallery-staff-in-zero-hours-protest-at-tate-modern, accessed July 23, 2014. Pulver, A. (2014) Women in Hollywood Still Trapped by “Celluloid Ceiling,” Report Finds. The Guardian, January 15, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/15/womenhollywood-celluloid-ceiling, accessed July 23, 2014. Rancière, J. (2010) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran. New York and London: Continuum International. Steyerl, H. (2011) Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy. In Aranda, J., Wood, B.K., and Vidokle, A. (eds.) Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

154

Silke Panse

Thompson, H. (2013) Prostitution: Why Swedes Believe They Got It Right. The Guardian, December 11, http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/dec/11/­prostitutionsweden-model-reform-men-pay-sex, accessed July 23, 2014. Watt, N. (2014) Figures Show Huge Rise in Zero-Hours Contracts. The Guardian, March 10, http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/mar/10/rise-zero-hours-contracts, accessed July 23, 2014. Waugh, T. (1984) Why Documentary Filmmakers Keep Trying to Change the World, or Why People Keep Making Documentaries. In Waugh (ed.) Show Us Life: Toward a History and Aesthetics of Committed Documentary, pp. 192–211. New York: Metuchen, and London: Scarecrow Press. Waugh, T., Winton, E., and Baker, M.B. (eds.) (2010) Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Willsher, K. (2014) Orange France Investigates Second Wave of Suicides Among Staff. The Guardian, March 19, http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/mar/19/orange-franceinvestigates-second-wave-suicides, accessed July 23, 2014. Young, E. (2013) Bangladesh Textile Workers’ Deaths “Avoidable.” BBC News, April 26, http:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22296645, accessed July 23, 2014.

7

The Work of the Documentary Protagonist The Material Labor of Aesthetics Silke Panse

Central Perspective and Decentralized Labor In landscape painting, the central perspective offers an illusory mastery of the focal field and demonstrates the human ability to recreate the world for the single eye of the artist and beholder. What is important is in the frame. It is not about what cannot be seen in the picture. In painting, landscape has been regarded as an “infinite field whose ‘jewel’ is the vanishing point” (Bryson, 1990: 71). Painting centers on the eye of the beholder drawing it into the vanishing point. As with the central ­perspective, the images in James Benning’s documentary El Valley Centro (2000) begin with the frame and then work inwards, but the visual centeredness emphasizes what is migrant offscreen and in sound. The emphasis of El Valley Centro’s static moving images on their perspectival center contrasts aesthetic centralization with material decentralization. The migrant aesthetics of images of migrants trouble the conventions of central perspective in landscape painting and confront the spectator with the invisibility of material labor, offscreen and in some shots also onscreen. In El Valley Centro a row of farmed grape vines frame the image from both sides in the central perspective (Figure 7.1). We do not fully see the pickers who are behind the vines rustling them, but we hear them speaking Spanish. The right row of grape vines casts a shadow between the bushes; a migrant picker is working in these shadows, invisible to us in front of our eyes. While in contemporary political theory, the emphasis is on immaterial labor as the kind of work which cannot be seen since there is no material product (Hardt and Negri 2004: 290), this shot raises the question of how visible even manual labor is. The picker then walks away from the camera towards the vanishing point and back again, exiting the shot as he entered it through the vines. A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

156

Silke Panse

Figure 7.1  A land worker invisible in the shadows of the vine lines of the central perspective in El Valley Centro (James Benning, 2000).

Looking now at just the row of vines, we are made aware that labor exists even if we do not see it. The migrant workers’ invisible existences are not only offscreen. Benning’s method of observation in a long take with a static camera is best suited for material labor – we cannot look and listen to immaterial labor, but his documentaries allow us to connect what can be seen and heard onscreen with the invisible labor offscreen and even, to some extent, onscreen. Labor does not need to be immaterial to be invisible. While the linear perspective in painting contains a unified and centered visual world for the beholder, El Valley Centro shows how this containment is not just an aesthetic one, but already inherent in the land itself. Although the parallel lines converge only on the picture plane, the lines of the central perspective in the Central Valley are shown as being maintained by agricultural laborers (Figure 7.2). Unlike a merely aesthetic reading based solely on the selection and framing by the one human artist, with whose “frame nature turns into culture, land into landscape” (Lefebvre 2006: xv), Benning’s camera does not assert that its frame is the only thing that shapes and conditions his images of the land. His camera acknowledges the working protagonists as not only working the land, but also his images of the land; not just the field, but also the focal field. While his earlier experimental films, such as One Way Boogie-Woogie (1977), explore on- and offscreen space through movements he gave instructions for, the non-interventional approach of his later documentaries brings out how the world is already directed. What can be called Benning’s land documentaries document the creation and control of the land. In a shot in LOS (2001), for example, grass is documented as being made to grow according to the actions of the gardener, which are determined by the owners of the garden and by the limits of the lawnmower: “it is a set-up due to the camera position, but not due to the choreographing of his [the gardener’s] movement. I wanted to record what he does, not tell him what to do. But I



The Work of the Documentary Protagonist

157

Figure 7.2  Land workers maintaining the central perspective in the Great Central Valley in El Valley Centro (James Benning, 2000).

chose where to place the camera, so his movement would define the space within my chosen frame” (Panse, 2009). Due precisely to the fact that Benning does not direct the actions in the image, and also because his camera does not assert its own subjectivity through extensive movements but remains static in a long shot, his films reveal the referential topography and the diverse economic and material agencies that are already shaping the land before it becomes an artist’s landscape. The manually laboring human – and the human narrative of labor – did not feature in pastoral landscape painting (Bryson, 1990: 60; Mitchell, 1995: 116), which is represented as unshaped by human labor (Barrell, 1980: 9) and unchanging. If there were workers at all in this eternal repetition of nature, such as idle shepherds, they did not work. Work was attributed to nature thus human labor did not need to be acknowledged. In 1836, before the advent of realist painting, Ralph Waldo Emerson found that one cannot really contemplate a poetic landscape, if workers are digging up the land (Emerson, 1986: 81). In 1859, Charles Baudelaire too played out paid labor against nature that works for free, and objected to the peasants working in the landscape of Millet’s realist paintings: “Instead of simply distilling the natural poetry of his subject, M. Millet wants to add something to it at any price” (Baudelaire, 1965: 195) – this “something” being the obtrusive workers. Pure landscape painting of this kind did not simply depict the landscape as it was, but it served a productive role. In the eighteenth century, the country estates and gardens of the wealthy English aristocracy were dramatically reconstructed to reflect these pastoral paintings. Reshaping landscape in this manner was then again ascribed to the landowners, not to the workers. In “Imperial Landscape” W.J.T. Mitchell challenges the concept of “a pure viewing of  landscape” (1994: 15) in painting. In a later article, he introduces the notion of landscape as a medium and underscores the manual labor in the manufacture of what

158

Silke Panse

the painting depicts: “The study of landscape as a medium would have to include physical landscaping, gardening, the shaping and interpretation of a ‘built’ (or ‘found’) environment, etc.” (1995: 104). But while acknowledging that pure landscape in painting “erases the signs of our own constructive activity” (1994: 16), and that landscape is “a representation of something that is already a representation in its own right” (1994: 14), Mitchell nevertheless remains in the framework of painting, representationalism, and nature as a cultural construct. In this social constructivism of the “cultural turn” (Jameson, 1998; Cole and Frost, 2010: 3), agency had again been placed on the human takers and owners of the images, to the detriment of human and nonhuman protagonists that materially shape the land and constitute the image. The laborer working the fields and the artist working on their image have been held apart, the one associated with functional manual labor directed by an employer and the other with an unalienated, voluntary, and non-functional aesthetic act. The separation between the materials of the worker and those of the artist follows along: “The photographic image does not belong to the natural world. It is a product of human labor, a cultural object” (Damisch, 1978: 70). But if the image as “a product of human labor” is divided from what it depicts, the division between the image and what it is an imprint of is emphasized. The argument goes that the image is the work of humans who have made it, nature is natural and does not work, nor does it need to be paid for its labor. Especially when for wages, labor is always the result of human ordeal, and if it is aesthetic, it is only relevant to how the image is made and not by whom or what it is constituted. In Benning’s California Trilogy, El Valley Centro (2000), LOS (2001), and Sogobi (2002), the aesthetics of landscape cannot be separated from the materialities of the labor on the land. The workers in the aesthetics of the landscape are not just protagonists in an ontologically separate environment. They are part of the material relations that make up the land as well as the image.

Figure 7.3  The materiality of the vanishing point in Tulare Road (James Benning, 2010).



The Work of the Documentary Protagonist

159

In painting, “the vanishing point is itself non-spatial, lacking as it does all qualities of space”; it does not represent “a specific spatial location – given that it is a mere point” (Grootenboer, 2005: 89). There is no material connection between what is on the canvas and what is portrayed on it, what is on canvas only exists there. By contrast, Benning’s Tulare Road (2010) suggests a materiality of the vanishing point in a landscape shaped by industrial farming – a movie of a road rather than a road movie. The image of the land looks abstracted, only consisting of lines since visible life has been erased through irrigation farming. There is nothing else in the image except for a road with gravel along the sides. The video plays with the point where a material object, a moving car, vanishes into the vanishing point and turns into the aesthetic abstraction of a dot, until another moving object, a truck, emerges out of the dot (Figure 7.3). A moving object might have vanished into a point that is even smaller in digital images than on film, but we know that this is merely a question of perception and that the car’s material existence has neither been created through the image nor been erased by it. In documentary images, as long as they are not computer generated, the vanishing point is not just the “spatial illusion” (Grootenboer, 2005: 89) that it is in painting. There is a connection between the image and the world it is an index of. In art, perspective has traditionally referred back to the subject whose viewpoint it is or for whom it is constructed. When Ai Weiwei points his middle finger up at the Eiffel tower in Study of Perspective – Eiffel Tower (1995–2003), his pointing refers back to him as the original source, especially as the sexual gesture of a male artist even as this is in the overt rejection of another national phallic symbol (Figure 7.4). In his pointed rejection of the connection between what is in the image and himself, the maker of the image, he nevertheless asserts himself as the center of the image. By contrast, when in Oscar William Sam (2012) Ahmet Öğüt’s index finger also comes into the image from center stage, but points into the crowd of Occupy protesters and

Figure 7.4  Ai Weiwei’s finger referring back to himself as the center of his perspective in Study of Perspective – The Eiffel Tower (Ai Weiwei, 1995–2010).

160

Silke Panse

Figure 7.5  Ahmet Öğüt’s index finger identifies Occupy protesters in Oscar, William, Sam (Ahmet Öğüt, 2012).

his voice lists their first names from offscreen, the pointing is from himself to someone else (Figure 7.5). A connection between the artist behind the camera and the protagonists in his images is established, rather than a denial of any relation. But the trajectory of a vantage line in the image through the index finger is marked as not entirely innocent. At the end of that line is not a point, but a person. This connection could be one of surveillance and the finger not merely contributes to formal aesthetics, but leads to identification as well.

The Working Point Sharon Lockhart’s Double Tide (2010) shows a clam digger in a Maine seascape moving from working in the foreground to working progressively farther into the distance in what looks like two long takes in a wide shot, one 43 minutes long and the other 56 minutes long.1 In the process of her digging, the clam digger transforms from a human figure, engaged in functional movements, into an abstract blot in the landscape (Figure 7.6). As she recedes, her movements look, from afar, increasingly dysfunctional and jerky, no longer identifiable as work. Her manual labor continues unchanged, right in front of our eyes, even as it becomes invisible for us. The worker appears to transform into a non-human protagonist in the foggy seascape, a moving rock, or, on the level of the image, a slightly fatter grain. While our understanding of her fluctuates between seeing the clam digger as a worker or as an animated blob, the manual laborer of the land becomes an active particle, a dot in a landscape that moves of its own accord. At some point the dot crawls out of the frame, as if to show us playfully how aesthetically uninteresting



The Work of the Documentary Protagonist

161

Figure 7.6  The point of the protagonist working the aesthetics of Double Tide (Sharon Lockhart, 2010).

the landscape looks without it, before working its way back into the frame. The digital video becomes more suggestive, the more the worker appears as an enigmatic but formal element of the aesthetics of the image. Even though the protagonist’s working movements are barely visible in the distance, the viewer remains connected to them through synchronous sound. The squelching noises of extracting the clam out of the mud prevent the documentary from being perceived merely in terms of aesthetics. Since we have seen that these sounds involve back-straining labor when she was picking the clams in the foreground, we retain the mental image of her work even as her image has ceased to be figurative. We are aware that the manual labor continues even if all we see is a beautiful image. The aesthetics are generated through arduous labor, not just by an artist making a mark (even though in this case the laborer, Jen Cassad, is also an artist when she is not digging for clams). As the figure  progressively transforms into a non-figurative trace of the activities and dynamics of material labor, it ceases to function as a representation of a worker. In contrast to the landscape being the center of attention and the worker being ­subsumed into the landscape as a mere pictorial device in pastoral painting, the compositional direction of looking in Double Tide follows the clam digger’s movements as the figure moves slowly across the static shot like a meandering pointer across the surface of painting. The worker, while reduced in scale and therefore anonymous, without perceptible affect and only larger expressions of the functional gestures of her arduous physical labor, emerges as an autonomous agent of landscape aesthetics. The working ­movements of the protagonist make the point awkward in its changing shape. The liminality of the point, simultaneously rambunctious dot and digging worker, ­irritates and challenges a pure perception of landscape. These aesthetics are impure, since the materiality of work effect the materiality of the

162

Silke Panse

image. Rather than the worker vanishing into the point, the point has vanished into the worker. The work is not only done on the pictorial plane, the clam digger works on the landscape as well as on the land.

Leveling the Field Like El Valley Centro, there are linear traces of industrial farming in the harvested fields of The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse, 2000). Filmmaker Agnès Varda expands gleaning as a metaphor to filming in this documentary and compares her making images to her protagonists gleaning vegetables. The gleaners, though, glean for their own consumption in unpaid labor. Gleaning is only of use for the gleaner. The gleaners eat and thereby destroy the object they have gleaned in its previous state, making it impossible for others to engage in the same act with the same object. The reverse happens in the “gleaning” of images: the images are edited into a new product that is then sold and consumed many times by many people. While the gleaners take what has been discarded as without value by the previous owner for their personal use, Varda makes a new product by her gleaning from the world for the consumption of many viewers. Everyone gleans – the ­filmmaker gleans, the psychoanalyst (Jean Laplanche) gleans, the Michelin star chef gleans – and the singularity of the material life of the actual gleaner who does not sell what he has gleaned as a film, as a therapy, or as a meal is sold as a consumable artistic product. Not to state the obvious, but there is a difference between vegetables and images. The potatoes have been dumped as waste before they have been gleaned. Varda’s images have not been discarded footage before they were found by her. The ­filmmaker also “gleans” valuable things, like Millet’s or Jules Breton’s original ­paintings of gleaners. The paintings in her film are neither regarded as waste nor are they destroyed by being filmed or watched, and the film does not vanish by being looked at. The Gleaners and I is held up as an example of a secondhand cinema that “literally uses only what is available” (Bozak, 2012: 166). But the filmmaker does not materially put the paintings of The Gleaners into her video. The film does not destroy the images by incorporating them into its body. We cannot eat images.2 While Varda appreciates that gleaning is a worthy activity, this is largely because of the comparison she makes between her filmmaking and the protagonists’ g­ leaning. Gleaning constitutes the image not through their manual labor, but as the aesthetic act of the filmmaker. Through the equation of the materiality of gleaning produce or  discarded household goods with the immateriality of gleaning images, the ­filmmaker metaphorically appropriates the protagonists’ manual work as her own aesthetic work. When the protagonist in the foreground visually departs from ­shaping the material aesthetics of the land by speaking into the camera, the landscape is ­separated from the work of the protagonists in the image and instead refers to the  filmmaker behind the camera as the one who has shaped the image. The ­aesthetics of the image are attributable to the filmmaker who engages the gleaner in



The Work of the Documentary Protagonist

163

Figure 7.7  A gleaner being gleaned in The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000).

a dialogue (Figure 7.7). The protagonists are working for the documentary and not with the land. The landscape – the view of the land – is disconnected from the work on the land. Although Varda is lauded for filming only “what she finds in her immediate world” (Bozak, 2012: 166), the artistic strategy of appropriation is recycled with more apparent ecological and ethical credibility as “gleaning.” Ecological concern is used as a conceit for documentary. The world is not appreciated as being itself creative, mutable, and working, only as discarded and in need of being recovered through the work of the filmmaker. In an analogy to deep ecology, the pressing issue in these post-environmental times cannot be to continue to merely appropriate in the name of art, but to acknowledge the inherent value of all relations that are at work not only because, but without and in spite of us who are taking and watching the images. Even the notion of reflexive documentary leads back to the human as filtering the world through that reflexive instance. When asked by Varda in The Gleaners and I Two Years Later (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse … deux ans après, 2002), the gleaning protagonist Alain, who is still unemployed and doing his voluntary work, is troubled by the director’s dominating presence in the previous film. He refers to The Gleaners and I as an indulgent self-portrait of the filmmaker and dislikes that “when you film yourself, you are not picking things up.” In contrast to the unimportant gleaners consuming what is discarded, any image Varda takes becomes important because it is taken by her. Roland Barthes describes something similar in photography, where “by familiar reversal, it [the photograph] decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes sophisticated acme of value” (2000: 34). Because the world is the filmmaker’s, there are no leftovers. The abstraction of the gleaning metaphor makes Varda’s “gleaning” of images a sweeping

164

Silke Panse

comparison in which her diverse human and non-human protagonists serve impersonal abstraction and personal narrative. Rather than The Gleaners being an instance of the selfless “school of modesty to which Varda says documentary belongs” (Cooper, 2006: 84), the filmmaker’s own self very much imposes the autobiographic into the foreground with her as the penultimate gleaner in what should perhaps rather be called a school of immodesty. When she films her hand, hair, and her camera’s lens-cap, the circularity of all things leading back to the taker of the images could not be much closer. This emphasis on herself has even been lauded as the reason for the documentary’s appeal – venerated as one of the top ten documentaries of all time (Sight and Sound 2014) – which B. Ruby Rich finds “is due in considerable part to Agnès Varda’s own presence” (2001: 33). The protagonists might be modest, but the filmmaker is not. Varda’s camera in The Gleaners and I has been compared to a paint brush: “Varda’s use of hand-held camera at times evokes the swipe of a painter’s brush stroke … The little digital camera becomes like a brush” (King, 2007: 423). This appears to be the crux of the problem: Varda does not allow the material relations to become apparent as those between the land and the image of the land, the world and the image, and between the diverse human and non-human, organic and inorganic protagonists, but pulls them all back to the human referent behind the camera through her idiosyncratic use of the camera which often films herself. Moreover, while the style of The Gleaners and I can be compared to that of painting, it does not match the realism of Millet’s The Gleaners (1857), to which the film self-consciously refers, rather it assimilates the often mocked hand-held subjective camera that signals documentary realism.3 In terms of painting, Varda’s style is more expressionistic than realistic. The artist foregrounds her gestures through filming, rather than depicting the protagonists as shaping their environment and the image. Realist painters, on the other hand, “are more concerned with the reality of [their] subject than with the ‘reality’ of their subjective feelings about it” as John Berger (1952) articulated it.4 Varda’s realist filming resembles neither gleaning nor realist painting. Then again, already Millet’s paintings of peasants were deemed insufficiently realist. Millet painted his land workers weighty and engrossed in heavy manual labor. His peasants were simultaneously material and transcendental. They were modeled on biblical scenes. This eternal repetition of the same was criticized for not being realist enough, since for the realist neither work, nor anything else, should be universalized. Realism “is bound to a concrete situation at a given moment in time” (Nochlin, 1990: 33). Instead, Millet’s The Sower (1850) was seen as “a constrained and static figure … moving neither forward nor back” (Clark, 1973: 93) – trapped in an essential state, but not as a result of his present material labor. Perhaps the reason for the popularity of Varda’s The Gleaners and I is similar to that of Millet’s painting: it is because these gleaners are “a comforting suggestion of the timelessness … of labor in general” (Nochlin, 1990: 117). Maybe it is the eternal transcendence of Millet’s land worker as an “unchanging figure” elevated to a “near-metaphysical entity” (115) that allows the peasant to transcend into another incarnation. Millet’s painted representation of a sower has also served as the model for Vik Muniz’s art, which uses the refuse that gleaners have collected on the world’s largest landfill site in Brazil for their portrait. In the documentary Waste Land (Lucy Walker, João Jardim,



The Work of the Documentary Protagonist

165

and Karen Harley, 2010), waste is recycled for a copy of the previous artwork that already represents an eternal figure. The pickers only arrive at the art market as a reincarnation of a classic character from art and by an artist. The invocation of material recyclability is used for the perpetual circularity of an eternal motif. The proceeds are donated to the Association of Recycling Pickers, but the landfill worker is only valuable for the art by fitting a template that was already metaphysical as a realist painting. The land worker as an unchanging figure continues to run from realism through to political theory today: “It is a commonplace, in fact, to conceive of peasants and village life as unchanged for centuries and even millennia,” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out (2004: 115): “What could be more eternal and basic to humanity than the figure of the peasant in close interaction with the earth, working the soil and p ­ roducing food?” (115). But they argue that land work has changed from the manual labor of the peasant, who “produces primarily for their own consumption” (116), to the immaterial labor of the agricultural knowledge worker: “the peasant is a historical figure that designates a certain way of working the soil” (115). However, the importance of the singular connections between the worker, their sustenance, and the land, should not be underestimated as the urban farmers of Detroit point out in Urban Roots (Mark MacInnis, 2011), where low-wage industrial labor and foreclosed homes have left behind unemployed workers and a post-industrial wasteland. In fact, living is only sustainable because this connection is singular, after the previous model of land and home ownership proved unsustainable. The unemployed urban land workers grow and harvest their food on plots they do not own. They would otherwise not be able to eat in a deserted cityscape where there are no shops to buy food from and no wages to buy it with. One can only get to the next shop that sells food with a car. The vegetables have been trucked in from distant lands and they are expensive and of lower quality than the vegetables the guerilla gardeners can grow themselves. As the gardeners specify, even if their small-scale farming could be incorporated into a large-scale ­agricultural operation, the wage they would earn would be so low that they could not afford to get to and buy the vegetables they grow. These are the new peasants who have been declared historical figures by Hardt and Negri. The eternal figure of the rooted, manual land worker has become a myth in the contemporary context of industrial farming and precarious migrant labor. Today, land workers have to be not settled in order to afford to work because their wages can only sustain an existence in a country where the cost of living is lower than in the one where they work. Similarly in the United Kingdom, the seasonal connection of the precarious Eastern European fruit pickers with the property of the Kentish farm landlord becomes material only in the moments of their temporary employment.

Picturesque and Impressionistic Documentary While realist painters, such as Millet with The Gleaners, opposed the picturesque by painting workers working, realist documentaries of work frequently seek to be picturesque. As Brian Winston notes, Griersonian documentary has “a tendency to see the

166

Silke Panse

Figure 7.8  Picturesque labor in Working Man’s Death (Michael Glawogger, 2005).

picturesque topic, but the search for the picturesque is to be found even in the least ‘aesthetic’ subjects” (2008: 43). Andrew Higson similarly observed that “the documentary movement … has always since the 1930s tended to aestheticise work and the working class, poverty and struggle – indeed has aestheticised struggle out of the image” (1984: 10). The realist anti-aesthetics of Pissarro, Millet, and Courbet have by now become accepted as what is deemed pretty in painting, but manual labor frequently continues to be depicted as picturesque in contemporary documentary. Working Man’s Death (Michael Glawogger, 2005), for example, won the Grierson Award for picturesque steadicam shots of hard physical labor in exotic locations across the globe. When rugged workers are filmed lugging heavy sulfur from a crater in Indonesia, the toxic gas merely registers as aesthetically pleasing – and not even sublime – fog (Figure 7.8). The same criticisms that were leveled at depictions of workers in picturesque painting in the eighteenth century by ­realists – “a picturesque image of the poor, whereby their raggedness became of aesthetic interest” (Barrell, 1980: 16) – can be leveled at this documentary. In Working Man’s Death, the viewer is distracted from perceiving the harshness of the worker’s toil by the beauty of the images. The viewer sees aestheticized labor without needing to register its material conditions. In order to avoid disturbing the aesthetic pleasure of the viewer, workers are also depicted as reassuringly content with their lot and brave in their conditions (emphasized in the liner notes on the DVD). While in painting the diminutive portrayal of the working figure often kept the beholder from getting emotionally too close, in this film distance is translated into temporality: the workers are not in the frame long enough to evoke empathy. In a kind of tourism of labor aesthetics, the traveling filmmaker only briefly drops into each site and even films tourists admiring the drudging workers like they do the landscape, as if to distract from the fact that his documentary does the same. In contrast to the



The Work of the Documentary Protagonist

167

long takes by a static camera, as used frequently by Benning and by Lockhart in Double Tide, the self-conscious camera movements of the beautifying steadicam override the working activities of the protagonist with the movements of the camera and merely draw attention to the medium and the filmmaker’s aesthetics. Unlike in Double Tide, the aesthetics of the image do not bring out the specificities of the material labor they depict, but instead divert attention away from them. And again, unlike in Double Tide, where the worker is part of the aesthetics and immanent to the abstractions of the image, Working Man’s Death maintains a separation between worker and image, and the protagonists work for the documentary image as well as for the documentarian in addition to their actual work. Before Double Tide, Lockhart made Exit (2008) and Lunch Break (2008), two ­documentaries whose aestheticizations can be said to turn workers into mere ­representatives. Exit (2008) consists of five shots of workers going in and coming out of the factory on five days. In the interval between work and life, we do not see what they do for work which is only inferred in the images of workers in front of the factory. In Lunch Break not only are the workers on a break and thus their working ­movements remain undocumented, but they are also submitted to the flow of a slow-motion tracking shot – a popular trope of aestheticization of the environment for manual labor (see also Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, 2006). But the considerably slowed down tracking shot along a factory corridor lined with workers eating their sandwiches merely fortifies the claustrophobic conditions of the factory. The apparatus of the factory remains unquestioned and is merely replaced by that of the film. In contrast to Lockhart’s Double Tide, the aesthetic strategy in Lunch Break does not work with the workers to give their work visibility (which is not the same as making the worker visible and thereby recognizable), but instead makes their labor invisible. There are quite a few picturesque images of work in documentary – picturesque rather than pastoral because the worker is at least visible and working in the image. But there are not many impressionist images of workers in painting or in documentary. Apart from Pissarro’s daubed working types in, for instance, Peasants in the Field (1890) or Peasants Carrying Straw (1850), impressionism was about leisure and pleasure. There are also not many happy images of workers in documentary, ­especially not of migrant manual laborers. But A Prism Splits Light (2011) by the artist Mike Marshall features an elusive combination of pleasurable, impressionistic images of migrant labor. An olive grove in Cyprus is tended by two Vietnamese migrant workers. A male worker sits in an olive tree sawing off branches, while a female worker picks them up and drags them away. Because of a shallow depth of field and diffused light, the images are impressionistic in their aesthetics, but they are not mere subjective impressions.5 In ephemeral images with intentionally d ­ istributed blur, the focus is spread across diverse areas. To precise and detailed sounds of human labor and non-human diversity, a branch is visible and sharp in one area and blurred in another. The same matter is ­rendered in parts realistic and in others impressionistic. But while the foci are disseminated across sections of the leaves in the trees and the buttercups in the meadow, the workers are always out of focus (Figure 7.9). We cannot make out their expressions,

168

Silke Panse

Figure 7.9  A worker not working for the documentary A Prism Splits Light (Mike Marshall, 2011).

but we see their peaceful working movements that evoke non-alienated contentment. The sounds of the worker sawing are accompanied by birds chirping and bees humming. The optimism of A Prism Splits Light may only be in the images, rather than imbuing the workers in that moment, but at least they do not have to pretend to be happy. Since the workers are out of focus, they are not pressured into being cheerful and working materially and immaterially harder because their employer might see the documentary. A Prism Splits Light protects the workers from a­ dditional labor because they are filmed, while the image is still inscribed by the protagonists’ working activities. Here documentary aesthetics guard the protagonist from affective labor by not allowing their faces and thereby identity and affect to be seen. A Prism Splits Light shows pleasing images of workers, rather than images of pleased workers in a way of aestheticization that shields the workers, rather than exploits them. The workers work in, but not for the documentary.

Realism and the Visibility of Labor With realism in painting, the workers on the land became progressively more visible and, eventually, their expressions become part of their depiction. By the early nineteenth century as “the resentments of the poor are now known,” they are still hidden “in the middle ground, where we can see their labour, but not their expressions” (Barrell, 1980: 22). In the Romantic landscape paintings of John Constable, because the workers are far away, the beholder can enjoy their image without acknowledging their physical toil or potential resentment. Distance here is a mode of containment, unlike in Double Tide and in Benning’s land documentaries, where



The Work of the Documentary Protagonist

169

distance saves the worker from recognition. As we cannot see their facial expressions, the workers “seem almost naturalized as part of the landscape” (Andrews, 1999: 174), and the effort of their labor is made invisible. That the beholder was able to see workers at all, including how their manual labor affected them, was thanks to realism. The image of work has been tied up with realism since workers were first depicted in realist painting. The French revolution of 1848 instigated the right to work at the same time of the first realist peasant paintings: the right of workers to be seen. When the expressions of workers finally became visible in realist painting, they were miserable. In Henry Wallis’s realist painting The Stone-Breaker (1857), the worker is not just unhappy, but has expired from working. Van Gogh’s Sower With Setting Sun (1888) only looks more content than Millet’s gloomy Sower (1850) because he is shone upon by a happy sun. Realism made the worker more visible, but what you could see were the harsh conditions of the worker’s life, a life defined by labor. In impressionistic paintings, outgrown from realism, life appeared happier, because one could not see the actual unhappiness. Impressionism generally avoided depictions of manual labor.5 If one could make out the scene more clearly, one would see misery. It is as though, objectively, there is only dejection, and realism made this essential unhappiness visible. Realism showed the worker as discontent. The expression of this alienation could be depicted because there was a separation between the worker and the work. Affect was not immanent to labor. When manual laborers were finally seen, they were not only seen as unhappy, but also as ugly: Millet and Courbet’s paintings show that “man is ugly and pitiable” (Hauser, 1999: 40). The apparent ugliness attributed to the workers in realist landscape painting reappeared later in terms of the anti-aesthetic of the realist film image (Wollen 1998: 89). Realism reveals the ethical and aesthetical ugliness of the world, finds the neo-realist André Bazin, too, when he looks at Erich von Stroheim’s films: “Take a close look at the world, keep on doing so, and in the end it will lay bare for you all its cruelty and its ugliness” (1967: 27). The ugliness of reality is best made visible in long takes and depth of field where as much as possible is visible for as long as possible. For Deleuze, to see the world in the limited terms of what he called the actual – of what is already there – is in itself miserable in its restrictions (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002). But usually, critiques of “­miserabilism” are attributed to a privileged position of denying negative working conditions due to identification with the ruling classes. For art scholar John Berger, other critics’ complaints about “a love of ugliness” in social realist painting came “with a dab at their mouth with a white folded handkerchief ” – the handkerchief in question here used as a sign of elite status (1955). In art as well as in documentary, to complain about ugly images of downtrodden workers continues to be deemed reactionary.6 While before realism, workers were depicted as idle in order to alleviate anxiety in the rich patrons and beholders (Barrell, 1980: 21), by the end of the nineteenth century, images of the poor not working generated anxiety. With realist paintings of workers working also came the moral prescriptive that they should be doing

170

Silke Panse

just that and that the painting was “a prescriptive image of them [the workers] as they should be, working” (Barrell, 1980: 13). In mid-nineteenth-century realism in painting, labor was supposed to be hard and heavy, with “a sense of gravity, both physical and moral, which it confers on all material things” (Sylvester, 1954: 63). Morality as style was mocked by Baudelaire who criticized Millet for turning workers, such as The Gleaners (1857), “in their monotonous ugliness” into ostentatious bearers of truth, “exercising a priestly function” (1965: 195). Protestant affect and work ethic of manual laborers in realist painting later also became emblematic of documentary realism and carried over from painting into Griersonian documentary (Winston, 2008). The filmmaker needed to have “a moral commitment” to capture the “dignity of the working man” in “moral realism” (Higson, 1984: 4). In the twentieth century, film theory countered fiction film escapism by again collapsing unhappiness into work, this time from the side of the working spectator: happiness was a mass-produced illusion made in Hollywood, an escape from the reality of work. Pleasure had to be denied (Wollen, 1982: 79; Mulvey, 1990). The protestant work ethic also weighed upon the radical viewer, in this atheist discourse, which suggested that displeasure was a subversive practice. The spectator experienced this discontent not only in response to alienating images, but also by working at watching. While refusing paid labor was regarded as a form of resistance, we should work at keeping a distance to the images we ­consume in our free time, and not just kick back. Unlike paintings of hard-working workers, which can only become prescriptive as a suggestion after the art work is finished, documentary is already prescriptive in the moment of filming and can add to the affective and manual labor of the worker. Documenting evidences and generates the affective labor of the protagonist, who should work with the required expression. Today, when the worker is not only required by his employer to look happy, but to be happy, the ability of capital to direct the world and its protagonists has gone far beyond the commissioned image of the pastoral or the picturesque. “The authenticity of being happy is important, customers pick up on that” (Preston, 2012), a fast food chain manager demands from her baristas. When an employee tried to start a union, he was sacked, but “the worker’s true offense was being unhappy enough to want to start a union” (Noah, 2013). “Pret workers aren’t supposed to be unhappy,” Paul Myerscough (2013) ­discerns: “It isn’t clear which is the more demanding, authenticity or performance, being it or faking it.” They are after our souls, not just our performance: “What modern management techniques are looking for is for the ‘worker’s soul to become part of the factory’” (Lazzarato, 1996: 134). To show alienation is not an option, we have to be in denial in order to work. When filming workers, documentarians have to be careful not to double the demand for authenticity of the worker’s employer and produce apparently authentic images of coerced authentic happiness. The world is already directed long before documentary comes into it, and not only coded in terms of social formation and superstructure, as has been the argument of the feminist critique of realism (McGarry, 1975: 50), but far more insidiously and thoroughly so on an affective and material level than ever before.



The Work of the Documentary Protagonist

171

Beyond Documentary Realism Following the first moving images of Workers Leaving the Factory (Lumière, 1895), the complaint about images of workers in documentary continues to be that they are not shown working (Comolli, 1996; Farocki, 2002; O’Shaughnessy, 2012), a critique astutely realized by Harun Farocki in his multiscreen installation Workers Leaving the Factory (1995). In a reiteration of the objections that led to realism in painting that finally showed workers working, documentarians filmed workers at work in a continuity from French realism to Griersonian documentary (Winston, 2008: 32). But because a face can now be matched with an identity through facial recognition software and because everyone’s uploaded snapshots multiply this surveillance, documenting a worker’s expressions is no longer progressive. The affect and emotions of the workers become visible at the cost of their identity, and since the times that realism attempted to make the worker visible, emotion itself has become labor. Unlike in Deleuzean philosophy, in which the singularity of affect liberates from the repetition through identity (Deleuze, 2005: 89), the visibility of affect reveals identity. By rendering the workers’ expression and identity invisible through aesthetic means while still showing their working activities, El Valley Centro, Double Tide, and A Prism Splits Light protect the working protagonist from identification as well as from the affective labor of looking, and even being, happy. With the realist moving image, not only is the image the model, as Bazin famously suggested with respect to the neo-realist fiction film image (1967: 14), but realist documentary can only show the model as image. In documentary realism, the protagonists are the image. They are the paintings. Documentary protagonists are the cheerful workers of the picturesque. Tom Gunning questions this indexical link and insists on a disconnection between the image and what it depicts – the separation of the moving image from the world it indexes: “When Bazin claims that ‘photography actually contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it,’ he denies the photograph the chief characteristic of a sign, that of supplying a substitute for a referent” (Gunning, 2007: 33). But the indexical connection is based on the fact that the image and the world both exist, not that one substitutes the other. What distinguishes documentary images from images that are solely created by humans, such as paintings or ­computer generated images, is that they look beyond themselves and seek a connection with what they are not (or not only). It is why we make documentary images and why we want to see them: because the world is not merely a human invention. The increased popularity of immaterial labor as knowledge work in the arts as well as skepticism about the indexical link between the world and the image has in the last years been met by a movement in the opposite direction away from dematerialization and semiotics towards a vital materialism that acknowledges all forces (Latour, 2009; Bennett, 2010). Especially documentary images are not merely visual, but are p ­ arasitical upon the materialities they index. Remonstrations about the causal link between the documentary image and its protagonists turn out to be semantic at a time when our indexed movements are sold as data.

172

Silke Panse

The value of the documentary protagonists becomes obvious when computer scientist Jaron Lanier suggests that we should be paid if we are tracked walking through a town by surveillance cameras and this data is then sold: “Information is people in disguise” (Scott, 2013; Lanier, 2013). The work of the documentary protagonist cannot be seen separately from the ­aesthetics of the work. If realism was about the right to show the misery of the worker working, today – where being filmed means being surveilled – merely being seen itself generates misery. Rather than the right to be visible, as was the case for the workers in realist paintings, the reverse is the case for depictions of working in ­documentary: the more we are visible, the more we also have to work affectively and materially for the documentary; we are working harder because we might be looked at by our employer; and because we are working, we have no rights to the documentary images of us in the view of the law.7 Rather than the right to see, as claimed for instance in The Right to Look (Mirzoeff, 2011), the documentary protagonist needs to claim the right not to be seen. Because documentary has a unique relation to the world, it has to acknowledge its  protagonists as aesthetic and material agents that contribute to its images. Through aesthetic means documentary can protect its protagonists from exposure, while at the same time give them a platform in a collaboration of forces in front of and behind the camera. With documentary, the balance shifts from the artist behind the image as its sole author to those creators that constitute the image. The work on the image is not just that of the artist, but the material and immaterial labor of those that are inscribed in the image. Documentary protagonists do not just work the image. They work the world and thereby the image.

Notes 1 Although, rather than these being two long takes of a worker in continuous movement, in a dialogue between the worker and their image that is imperceptible to the viewer, the takes are only 10 minutes long, congruent with the length of the reel of Lockhart’s 16mm camera, and the worker holds her position while the magazine is changed (Lockhart, 2010). 2 My concerns are similar to those of Michael Marder who looks at The Gleaners and I in terms of food ethics: “Gleaners, more often than not, have no other choice but to procure food by seeking what remains after the harvest or in the aftermath of wasteful consumption in urban centers. Not so with the aesthetic gleaners, such as Varda herself, who engage in this activity not out of necessity but out of the freedom afforded by art. This divide is telling and troublesome to the nth degree” (Marder, 2013: 35). 3 Whether realism is depicting conditions more objectively, or whether it is a documentary style, has, of course, been subject to ongoing debate (Winston, 1995: 34). 4 Berger’s view on realism is contradicted in David Sylvester’s claim about the same “kitchen-sink school” of realist painters, that “they are not objective in their realism,” that “their design tends to be picturesque,” and that it leans “strongly towards romanticism or expressionism” (1954: 62). Sylvester notes the disparity between an aesthetics of the rich used for a content of the poor with respect to the British realist painters of the 1950s: “The



The Work of the Documentary Protagonist

173

kitchen is furnished like a poor man’s kitchen, but the painter might equally well have been painting a rich man’s drawing room for all the difference it would have made” (63). 5 This is apart from Pissarro’s peasants, who were depicted in harmony with the land they worked on. 6 Christa Blümlinger, for example, finds that there is a “conservative attack” on miserabilism with respect to the documentary Aubervilliers (Eli Lothar, France, 1946) which depicts the conditions of the poor in Paris (Blümlinger, 2012: 53). 7 I discuss the immaterial labor and the (lack of) rights of documentary protagonists more in “The Work and the Rights of the Documentary Protagonist” (Panse, 2014)

References Andrews, M. (1999) Landscape and Western Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baudelaire, C. (1965) The Salon of 1859. In Mayne, J. (ed. and trans.) Art in Paris 1845–1862: Reviews of Salons and Other Exhibitions, pp. 144–216. London: Phaidon. Barrell, J. (1980) The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barthes, R. (2000) Camera Lucida [1980]. London: Random House. Bazin, A. (1967) What is Cinema?, vol. 1, ed. and trans. H. Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berger, J. (1952) Looking Forward: An Exhibition of Realist Pictures by Contemporary British Artists at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. London: Whitechapel Gallery. Berger, J. (1955) Social Realism and the Young. New Statesman and Nation, 1273 (30 July), 133–134. Blümlinger, C. (2012) Das Archiv-werden des Films im Lichte des Gemeinschaftlichen. In Kappelhoff, H. and Streiter, A. (eds.) Die Frage der Gemeinschaft: Das westeuropäische Kino nach 1945. Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8. Bozak, N. (2012) The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera and Natural Resources. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bryson, N. (1990) Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays in Still Life Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clark, T.J. (1973) The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848–1851. London: Thames & Hudson. Cole, D. and Frost, S. (2010) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Comolli, J.-L. (1996) Corps mécaniques de plus en plus célestes. Images Documentaires, 24, 39–48. Cooper, S. (2006) Selfless Cinema: Ethics and French Documentary. Oxford: Legenda. Damisch, H. (1978) Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image. October, 5, 70–72. Deleuze, G. (2005) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. (2002) Dialogues II. London and New York: Continuum. Emerson, R.W. (1836). Nature. Boston: James Munroe. Farocki, H. (2002) Workers Leaving the Factory, trans. L. Faasch-Ibrahim. Senses of Cinema. com, July 21, http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/harun-farocki/farocki_workers/, accessed July 23, 2014.

174

Silke Panse

Grootenboer, H. (2005) The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in SeventeenthCentury Dutch Still-life Painting. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Gunning, T. (2007) Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality. Differences, 18(1), 29–52. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press. Hauser, A. (1999) The Social History of Art, vol. 4, Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age. London and New York: Routledge. Higson, A. (1984) Space, Place, Spectacle. Screen, 25(4–5), 2–21. Jameson, F. (1998) The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. New York: Verso. King, H. (2007) Matter, Time, and the Digital: Varda’s The Gleaners and I. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 24(5), 421–429. Lanier, J. (2013) Who Owns the Future? New York: Simon and Schuster. Latour, B. (2009) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lazzarato, M. (1996) Immaterial Labor. In Virno, P. and Hardt, M. (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy, pp. 132–146. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Lefebvre, M. (2006) Introduction. In Lefebvre (ed.) Landscape and Film. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Lockhart, S. (2010) Double Tide Q + A. BFI Southbank, October 17, http://www.bfi.org.uk/ live/video/479, accessed July 23, 2014. Marder, M. (2013) Is It Ethical to Eat Plants? Parallax, 19(1), 29–37. McGarry, E. (1975) Documentary, Realism, and Women’s Cinema. Women and Film, 2(7), 50–57. Mirzoeff, N. (2011) The Right to Look: A Counter-History of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994) Imperial Landscape. In Mitchell (ed.) Landscape and Power, pp. 5–34. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1995) Gombrich and the Rise of Landscape. In Bermingham, A. and Brewer, J. (eds.) The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, pp. 103–118. London: Routledge. Mulvey, L. (1990) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Erens, P. (ed.) Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, pp. 28–40. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Myerscough, P. (2013) Short Cuts. London Review of Books, 35(1), 25, http://www.lrb.co.uk/ v35/n01/paul-myerscough/short-cuts, accessed July 23, 2014. Noah, T. (2013) Labor of Love. The Enforced Happiness of Pret A Manger. New Republic, February 1, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112204/pret-manger-when-corporationsenforce-happiness, accessed July 23, 2014. Nochlin, L. (1990) Realism. New York and London: Penguin Books. O’Shaughnessy, M. (2012) French Film and Work: The Work Done by Work-Centered Films. Framework 1, 155–171. Panse, S. (2009) Unpublished section of interview with James Benning, Duisburg Documentary Film Festival, November 4. Panse, S. (2014) The Work and the Rights of the Documentary Protagonist. In Mazierska, M. and Kristensen, L. Marx at the Movies. Revisiting History, Theory and Practice. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.



The Work of the Documentary Protagonist

175

Preston, R. (2012) Smiley Culture: Pret A Manger’s Secret Ingredients. The Telegraph, March 9, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/9129410/Smiley-culture-Pret-A-Mangers-secretingredients.html, accessed July 23, 2014. Rich, B.R. (2001) Gleaners Over Gladiators. The Nation, April 9, http://www.thenation.com/ article/gleaners-over-gladiators, accessed July 23, 2014. Scott, L. (2013) Review of Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier. The Guardian, February 27, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/27/who-owns-future-lanier-review, accessed July 23, 2014. Sight and Sound (2014) The Greatest Documentaries of All Time – all the votes. September 2014, http://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-sound-magazine/greatest-docs-full-poll/#/?poll=combined& film=4ce2b8485cde0, accessed September 28, 2014. Sylvester, D. (1954) The Kitchen Sink. Encounter, December, 61–64. Winston, B. (1995) Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute. Winston, B. (2008) Claiming the Real II: Documentary, Grierson and Beyond. London: British Film Institute. Wollen, P. (1982) Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies. London: Verso. Wollen, P. (1998) Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. London: British Film Institute.

8

Old School Capitalism in Post-Socialism The Struggles of Želimir Žilnik’s Workers Ewa Mazierska

Work in Eastern European Socialist Ideology, Everyday Experience, and Cinema1 Work was an obsession of Soviet and Eastern European politicians and ideologues, as conveyed by phrases such as “the state of workers and peasants” or the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” suggesting that the will of the working people should determine the priorities of the entire population. In capitalism, unemployment is regarded as a necessary phenomenon for the development of the economy and society, as it allows for the faster creation of surplus value, accumulation of capital, capitalist expansion, and technological progress. By contrast, under the system known as socialism, real socialism, state socialism, or crude communism, work is treated as both an entitlement and a duty, and unemployment as an aberration, which needs to be rectified. Once socialism was established somewhere, practically the whole adult population (and on occasion even children), was recruited into the army of workers. Ironically, this linking of socialism with hard work is not in the spirit of Marx, who, borrowing from the utopian socialist, Charles Fourier, envisaged life under communism as defined by leisure, not work, as conveyed in the famous passage about the well-rounded individuals of the future who will be “hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon” (Marx and Engels, 1947: 22). The main reason for making socialist people work at top speed was that socialist economies lagged behind the capitalist world. Lenin was convinced that if Russia did not catch up with the West, socialism would be destroyed and the world socialist revolution would be postponed indefinitely. To prevent this happening all possible means were mobilised to ensure that Russian people worked so hard that they A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



Old School Capitalism in Post-Socialism

177

would overtake their capitalist competitors. To achieve this goal new industrial centers and cities around them were built, a Fordist-Taylorist system to increase productivity was introduced (Lenin, 1965: 259), and “work-shy” citizens were sent to forced labor camps. Furthermore, ideological means were employed to encourage people to be enthusiastic workers. They included medals for “shock workers,” namely workers exceeding many times their daily quotas, monuments edifying work, as well as mass production of novels, plays, songs, and films devoted to work. However, here “work” means predominantly material, industrial production. This was because in urban industrial development, rather than in the spheres of agriculture or art, the gap between the socialist East and the capitalist West was felt most acutely (Harrington, 1974). Due to the aforementioned measures undertaken by socialist leaders work as promoted under socialism was very different from the Marxist ideal of non-alienated work, at times even more brutalizing than under capitalism. This opinion informs many memoirs written by socialist dissidents (e.g., Djilas, 1966). In a book published in 1955, an author writing under the pseudonym Daniel Norman argues that the British worker’s opposite number in the USSR (where “the system of wage labor and exploitation has been abolished”, as Stalin pretended) earns less, works longer hours, has much less variety of goods on which to spend his money, has trade unions which exist only to squeeze more and more work out of him, is tied to his particular factory, and has the prospect of being sent to a forced labor camp if he makes a mistake or protests against his lot; yet he, according to Muscovite “Marxism”, represents the most advanced, emancipated and free worker in the world. (Norman, 1955: 8)

Michael Burawoy and János Lukács summarise this situation even more succinctly: “The dictatorship of the proletariat became the dictatorship over the proletariat” (Burawoy and Lukács, 1992: 146). Such opinions were echoed, albeit in a diluted form, in official socialist media. The famous Polish economist, Oskar Lange, in an article published in the journal Samorząd Robotniczy (Workers’ Self-Government) in 1965, admitted that in his country Workers, as a result of obstructions in the development of workers’ self-government, among other things have not felt their social advancement to the full. They are not sufficiently aware that they are effectively participating in managing the economy. They have the impression that they are on the lowest rung in the social hierarchy of the factory. (Quoted in Conquest, 1966: 9)

Another aspect of work under Eastern European socialism, which differed hugely from the Marxist ideal, concerned work relations, which were translated into relations between the citizen and the state, namely the lack of democracy with regard to the use of surplus product and surplus value. Its central appropriation laid the foundation for a new dominant, bureaucratic class, popularly known as the nomenklatura. This class secured for itself excessive bonuses and privileged access

178

Ewa Mazierska

to scarce goods and services, at the expense of the rest of the citizens (Burawoy and Lukács, 1992: 146–147). However, the attitudes to work varied from period to period and from country to country. The period in the history of European socialist countries when work was most ruthlessly extracted and most feverishly worshiped was known as Stalinism. The cinematic movement most closely related to it that reflected this attitude stylistically and even thematically is known as socialist realism. In the Soviet Union it lasted from the early 1930s till the mid 1950s and in other socialist countries it began after the Second World War and finished about the same time as in the Soviet Union. That said, many elements of socialist realism or its underlying ideology did not disappear overnight, but lingered during subsequent decades. After this period, various “thaws” swept the socialist world and work lost its privileged position in socialist cinema, being replaced by topics pertaining to the private lives of their inhabitants or to national histories, suppressed during the Stalinist period. It is possible to identify movements in feature filmmaking, where work is placed at the center of the discourse, for example the Czech New Wave of the 1960s or the Cinema of Moral Concern in Poland in the second half of the 1970s, and filmmakers for whom it remained of crucial importance throughout their entire career, such as Miloš Forman. However, after the mid 1950s, work in mainstream socialist cinemas never regained its central position. Increasingly, it became a preserve of documentary cinema, which took upon itself the duty to represent what was before deemed unrepresentable for ideological reasons, namely the lacuna between socialist ideals and the realities of work. The precise subjects varied, reflecting the specific situation of a given country and the interests of the filmmakers. In 1970s and 1980s Hungary and, to some extent, in Yugoslavia, some of the most important documentaries about work concerned migrant workers and discrimination against minorities, such as employment practices toward the Gypsy population. In Poland a large number of films were devoted to female industrial workers. This reflected the fact that a high proportion of documentary filmmakers in Poland were female, for example Krystyna Gryczałowska, Danuta Halladin, Irena Kamieńska, and Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz, and the conflict between the socialist discourse on work, which expected women to work outside the home, and the Catholic tradition, which rendered home as a privileged site of female labor.

Work in Yugoslav Politics and Film In 1950, only two years after the break with the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia opted for a self-managed socialism, or self-management, which was comprised of a system of autonomous cooperative enterprises (Allcock, 2000: 76–78). In one way this system was closer to the Marxist ideal than crude communism practiced in countries such as the Soviet Union or Bulgaria by allowing workers more power at the factory level,2 but, in another way, was closer to capitalism, by accepting unemployment as an inevitable by-product of an efficient economy. One consequence of such an approach



Old School Capitalism in Post-Socialism

179

was allowing Yugoslav citizens the freedom to travel abroad, a privilege withdrawn in other socialist countries. The borders were open primarily for the unemployed to go out, find jobs in the West, and that way support their family back in Yugoslavia. The capital earned by the Yugoslav Gastarbeiter was a crucial source of income for the country. The Gastarbeiter were thus dubbed “the seventh republic”; Yugoslavia encompassed six republics and the seventh one, made up of economic emigrants, was situated abroad. Gal Kirn argues that due to its focus on individual responsibility and entrepreneurship, and the importance attributed to the knowledge economy, Yugoslavia’s self-management anticipated post-Fordism (Kirn, 2010: 257–260). Yugoslav filmmakers, working as freelance professionals, rather than, as in other socialist countries, being tied to the centrally funded studios, confirmed this idea (Levi, 2007: 15). One can risk the statement that Yugoslav filmmakers under self-management had more political yet less financial freedom than their colleagues in the rest of Eastern Europe.3 This is especially the case in the late 1960s to mid 1970s, when Želimir Žilnik began his career: the period of a flourishing Yugoslav New Wave, known also as the Black Wave or Black Film,4 still regarded as the most important movement in Yugoslav cinema and the main source of its international renown. The specific situation of both Yugoslav workers and filmmakers directly affected the treatment of work in this country’s cinema. Yugoslavia was the only socialist country whose filmmakers not only made films about work, but also about its lack and what is termed today, its “flexibility”: workers’ need to work outside the traditional 8 to 4 or 9 to 5 pattern and to move from one place to another in search of employment. This is the case of, for example, Dzimi Barka in Živojin Pavlović’s Kad budem mrtav i beo (When I Am Dead and Pale, 1967). The character of this fiction film with elements of documentary cinema navigates through the murky waters of the Yugoslav economy, where work is both scarce and poorly paid, often moving forward thanks to petty crime, such as stealing money from fellow workers. Dzimi Barka self-manages his life rather than being overmanaged by the political and economic authorities as would have been the case of the characters shown in films made in Poland or Hungary. Another example is the representation of immigrant and itinerant workers in Čovek nije tica (Man Is Not a Bird, 1965) by Dušan Makavejev. The countryside features in Yugoslav films relatively more often than in other socialist cinemas and not merely as the site of economic and political backwardness, but as a site of class struggle, as testified by the protests of agricultural workers in Pavlović’s film, as well as in the works of directors such as Branko Bauer, Fadil Hadzić, Veljko Bulajić, Vatroslav Mimica, Milutin Kosovać, and Bakir Tanović. During this time the division between documentary and feature filmmaking was less rigid in Yugoslavia than elsewhere in the socialist world. This was due to lower budgets, the expectation to return to the documentary form if the filmmaker failed to secure sufficient resources to make a full-length film, and perhaps opposition to the highly staged, big budget, epic and politically conformist partisan films which dominated in Yugoslavia in the 1950s and 1960s. The majority of New Wave feature films resemble documentaries of a kind. They are shot on location, in industrial

180

Ewa Mazierska

plants or disused factories, and we see in them people playing themselves and looking straight to camera. Frequently the style abruptly shifts from a story centered on an individual protagonist to a scientific or pseudo-scientific examination of a specific aspect of social life, with extraneous material inserted to illuminate the point. The master of this hybrid form, the model of which in Western cinema was the 1960s Vivre sa vie (1962) by Jean-Luc Godard, was Dušan Makavejev. The close connection between documentary and feature form was acknowledged by the filmmakers themselves. When in 2011 I interviewed Makavejev, regarded as the most visionary director of the Yugoslav New Wave generation and perhaps the most surrealistic director to come from “socialist soil,” I was surprised to hear that he never regarded himself as an anti-realist or visionary filmmaker (Mortimer, 2009). On the contrary, he described himself as a documentarist through and through who did not add anything to the life he observed. He simply came to the place where interesting things happened and registered them on his camera, and he did so because life is richer and more surprising than fiction.

The Cinema of Želimir Žilnik Žilnik was one of the leading lights in the Black Wave and Yugoslav cinema as a whole. The importance of his output became even better acknowledged after the dissolution of the Yugoslav state. Daniel Goulding writes about Žilnik’s debut feature, Rani radovi (Early Works, 1969) as “closer than any film of the period to the Yugoslav radical student movement of the late sixties – especially in its attack on official complacency and corruption, and societal surrender to bourgeois materialism” (Goulding, 1992: 198). Boris Buden describes Žilnik as “the most important author of the Black Wave, whose entire filmic opus, extending over almost half a century, represents the most radical and consistent expression of ‘blackness’” (Buden, 2012: 176), understood as a highly pessimistic assessment of the represented reality. Work is the main subject of Žilnik’s cinema, but unlike socialist realist classics, where the focus is on the processes of work, thus brushing aside the question of the politics of work and especially class struggle, which was conveniently located in other times and places, Žilnik treats work as a social problem and he privileges hidden work. He rarely centers his attention on the socialist “aristocracy,” namely the industrial working class; instead he films the margins of the world of labor: lumpenproletariat, orphan children who have to earn their daily bread, and clandestine workers. For example, his 1968 documentary, Nezaposleni ljudi (The Unemployed), concerns migrant workers and those who were struggling to find employment both at home in Yugoslavia and abroad. In the documentary made in West Germany, Inventur – Metzstrasse 11 (Inventory, 1975), he shows a large number of people of different nationalities, living in the same apartment block in Munich, who came to Germany because they lacked work at home or could not earn a decent living there. In this way the economic reality comes across as a complex social system – work appears somewhere because it is missing elsewhere and its lack reflects the problems



Old School Capitalism in Post-Socialism

181

suffered by a given population. Reflecting Marx’s concept of the fetishism of commodities, Žilnik also suggests that work has a hidden dimension; there is often something shameful or dishonest about work. For example, in Early Works we see that the agricultural machines which the group of young people discover in Vojvodina have German inscriptions on them, thus suggesting that somebody who had labored there was most likely expelled from this territory (Beganović, 2012: 146). Branislav Dimitrijević observes that the “main features of Žilnik’s style are a fictional documentarism or documentarist fictionalism, work with non-professional actors, the direct relation of the protagonists to the camera-eye, a lack of distinction between the ‘acted’ and ‘spontaneus’ etc.” (Dimitrijević, 2009: 138). The use of nonprofessional actors is traditionally regarded as the means to add authenticity to a film; this was the reason to employ them, for example, in the films of Italian neorealism (Bazin, 1971: 65). It could be argued that such a method is conducive to the Marxist ideal of non-alienated work because unlike the professional actor, the nonprofessional actor might be less alienated by playing him/herself. Žilnik’s method affects the way he treats work in his films. We get the sense that the director does not want merely to show us how people work or that they are denied work, but to intervene in their situation. He asks the people whom he films to do something, become actors in a double sense – actors to be filmed and actors in the theater of life. He then makes the viewers aware of the changes the film effects in real life. In Crni film (Black Film, 1971), Žilnik brings some homeless people to his own apartment and gives himself the task of finding housing for them; in Inventory he assembles the inhabitants of one block on its staircase and asks them to relate their story to the camera. He often points to the artistic talent of the people from the margins. In films such as Pioniri maleni mi smo vojska prava, svakog dana ničemo ko zelena trava (Little Pioneers, 1968), Early Works, and Tako se kalio čelik (How the Steel Was Tempered, 1988) they are shown playing musical instruments, dancing, or simply being good actors with interesting faces and stories. In this way he demonstrates that these people are not human waste or a mass of flesh and bones to be used in anonymous industrial production, but they can be “upgraded” to the position of producers of culture. The fact that he employs amateurs, including members of the underclass in his films, perhaps even paying them, is a means to transform their situation both in a material sense and by rendering their life as meaningful. His films thus also serve a culturally therapeutic role. At the same time, he draws our attention to the fact that making a film is only a temporary solution to their problems, most importantly in Black Film, where in the end the director admits that he was unable to solve the problems of homeless people. Thus something more than a film is needed to change their lives; a gap between representation and reality has to be bridged by (straightforward) political intervention rather than political art. Again, such a conclusion chimes with the famous dictum by Marx that philosophers only explained the world; while they should change it. In making his films about work Žilnik also points to his own work as a documentary filmmaker, making us aware of what he is doing to shoot a film – where he is

182

Ewa Mazierska

looking for his subjects and how he utilizes them. There is an ideological motivation behind this reflexivity, resulting from his desire to demystify the mode of production, to show the work hidden behind the filmmaker’s final product. In this way he emulates Marx, whose goal was to defetishize commodities. Moreover, unlike many filmmakers and artists at large, who feel superior over other types of workers, Žilnik regards himself as an “ordinary” worker. This reflects his personal modesty, but also can be seen as an important condition of an effective collaboration with his actors, who are not professionals. We learn that he goes where fiction filmmakers do not dare to tread, for example to hostels for the unemployed or cellars where the homeless dwell. In order to learn about his protagonists, he had to accompany them on their journey, share their experience over a considerable period, rather than limit himself to a gesture of solidarity. The impression that he is close to his subjects is achieved either by casting himself as one of the characters or making us aware of the camera, and thus the filmmaker’s presence. At the same time, he underscores his own relatively privileged position vis-à-vis his subjects and in this way the failure of self-managed socialism or any type of real socialism, to create an egalitarian and prosperous society.

Old School Capitalism In Old School Capitalism (2009) Žilnik continues his investigation of work in Yugoslavia, or rather on the territory of old Yugoslavia. As on earlier occasions, he puts at the center those who are on the margins of the laboring class and discusses work in the context of a specific political situation. And yet, despite being made on a shoestring budget of about 30,000 Euros, Old School Capitalism comes across as Žilnik’s magnum opus and the most ambitious film I know which tackles the subject of work and workers in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. This is because it presents the current situation in Serbia in the context of Yugoslavia’s history, as well as neoliberal or global capitalism. Secondly, it takes issue with the meanings of different types of work: industrial, agricultural, entrepreneurial, intellectual, and artistic. The film also offers an innovative and complex approach to blending documentary and fictional techniques, never resolving the line where actual events blur into fictionalized ones. The origin of the film lies in the protests of worker-shareholders in the Zrenjanin factories in Serbia in the early 1990s, “Sinvoz” and “BEK,” about the way the management of their factories was handled during the process of Serbia’s transition from self-management to the new system of neoliberal capitalism. These and other Yugoslav factories went through particular stages: privatization, bankruptcy, closing down, often giving way to new types of enterprises, focused on consumption rather than production, such as shopping malls. Their situation reflected a wider postcommunist and neoliberal trend toward extreme disciplining of labor and reduction of the workforce in the name of the socialist East catching up with the West – remodernizing in a sense. David Kideckel, engaging with the concept of the Eastern



Old School Capitalism in Post-Socialism

183

European “transition” to the European West, claims that “the region’s problematic is not too slow a movement to capitalism (as ‘transition’ would have it) but too fast; not too little capitalism, but too much. Rather than postsocialist, it is better understood as ‘neo-capitalist’, a social system that reworks basic capitalist principles in new, even more inegalitarian ways than the Western model from which it derives” (Kideckel, 2002: 115). Kideckel and others observe that the poorer and more chaotic the Eastern European country or region, the more zealously it marched towards the West, understood in such terms. Serbia, being debilitated by war, along with other countries previously belonging to Yugoslavia, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, was in the “avant-garde” of the countries adopting neoliberal principles. In the case of Serbia the war was used to accelerate the transition to neoliberal capitalism, as wars allow for the suspension of rights of ordinary citizens. The Western perception of Serbs as bloody invaders, attacking neighboring nations in the name of their national, outdated interests, inevitably rendered the topic of the labor struggle in Serbia invisible to international viewers. This might be one reason that Žilnik’s film received little exposure or recognition abroad both in comparison with his earlier works, critical of Yugoslav socialism, and the other Serbian films concerning the Balkan wars. However, in its indirect way, we can say that Old School Capitalism sheds more light on the issue or regional strife than many “straightforward” war films. Serbian workers objected to being excluded from the vital decisions concerning their factories, on the grounds that they were their co-owners. It could be argued that this was the case across the whole of the socialist world, as everything there belonged to the proletariat, but in Yugoslavia this was officially acknowledged, as the workers there directly invested part of their salaries in the development of their workplaces. Yet, the new state and the whole apparatuses of power rejected this right. As Žilnik himself puts it, “Everything was privatized and then given to the new capitalist buyers and most of those, as we can now see, had been either criminals or gained their wealth in Milošević’s system, when the state gave privileges to some functionaries. These new owners are aware that the legitimacy of their ownership is questionable” (quoted in DeCuir, 2010). Branka Ćurčić observes that the narrative on modernization and transition was also used to “discursively cleanse” the striking workers – as a result of demanding respect of their rights they were labeled Stalinists and criminals: The workers in Zrenjanin created a double excess in contemporary Serbian reality: they dared to self-organise, demanding their right to work and they have created an interruption in the “smooth” process of absolute privatisation “as the ultimate realisation of freedom”. Still activities of this marginalised social group have their dark side as  well. In a number of cases they resulted in death and suicide due to additional ­pressures workers had to face. (Ćurčić, 2009: 193–134)

Žilnik wanted to show the workers’ success in undermining the logic of transition and the difficulty of building on this success. Initially, he made two “straightforward”

184

Ewa Mazierska

documentaries about the protests but thanks to receiving some additional funding he managed to incorporate them into a wider narrative which eventually became Old School Capitalism. The phrase “old school capitalism” used in the title summarizes Žilnik’s assessment of the post-socialist period – it comes across as a repetition of old style capitalism, as depicted by Engels at the beginning of the chapter on “The Great Towns” in The Condition of the Working Class in England: What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man’s house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together. (Engels, 2009: 69)

The main characters in Old School Capitalism (Figure 8.1) are dispossessed workers, whom Branislav Dimitrijević compares to lumpenproletariat from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Dimitrijević, 2010). However, Marx regarded lumpenproletariat as a reactionary force at a margin of the proletariat. Žilnik, on the other hand, suggests that under post-communist neoliberalism, at least its Serbian version, lumpenproletariat encompassed practically the whole old communist industrial working class. This idea is conveyed at the beginning of the film, where we see a large demonstration in Niš against closing down factories and the pauperization of the Serbian population, alternating between the crowds and a political activist addressing them.

Figure 8.1  Dissatisfied workers in Old School Capitalism (Želimir Žilnik, 2009, produced by Playground Produkcija).



Old School Capitalism in Post-Socialism

185

It appears as if nothing is improvised in this part – the camera simply registers the pro-filmic events which would have taken place anyway. Then the camera zooms into a smaller group of characters to represent their take on the situation. Such a method brings to mind other filmmakers who in individual films seamlessly intertwine fiction and documentary cinema, for example Andrzej Wajda’s Człowiek z żelaza (Man of Iron, 1981) and Nanni Moretti’s Aprile (1998). However, while in the films of other directors it is relatively easy for the viewer to determine where documenting ends and fiction begins, this is not the case here because the fictional part of Žilnik’s film bears no mark that distinguishes it from the documentary part. Žilnik chooses for his actors people who look as if they belonged to the crowd shot previously – and indeed some of them did belong to it – unlike Wajda, who relied on stars in Man of Iron and used ordinary people merely as a background. For a large part of the film Žilnik shoots his characters in their natural environment, for example marching with other protesters, and films the staged sequences in exactly the same cinematic style as the documentary part, using a shaky handheld camera and ­allowing for gaps in the narrative, as if to account for the fact that the documentary filmmaker cannot be everywhere. Most of the time we are not sure if his actors talk from scripted text or improvise, because they behave in the same way as the characters in the documentary parts. For example, they speak in a clumsy way or hesitate, as if not certain what to say, as is often the case with the people caught on camera by surprise. There is also a perfect match between their unglamorous faces and their roles in the film as ordinary or marginalized people. Moreover, while professional actors try to hide their idiosyncrasies, Žilnik’s actors enrich their roles with them, such as their specific way of walking and their own clothes. For this reason I was convinced that they improvised and the director had to correct my mistake. In reality, their parts were scripted, although in the process of rehearsal their lines changed, to make them more suitable to their personalities. A particularly interesting character and actor is the leader of a small group of anarchists, who talks about the role of the working class in earlier revolutions with great conviction and eloquence, which makes one realize the inadequacy and hollowness of today’s mainstream left politics. He is played by Ratibor Trivunać, in reality an anarchist politician. In his somewhat scruffy, “revolutionary” clothes and beard he awakens association with early socialists, especially Marx – he thus comes across as a new Marx for the new (post-)Yugoslavia. His engagement with left-wing activists from other parts of ex-Yugoslavia and his interest in world politics, demonstrated by him publicly burning an American flag, strengthens this association. It should be mentioned that this happened in reality and Trivunać ended up in jail for his protest. The film restages this sequence of events. Although quite early on Žilnik leaves the crowd to concentrate on a smaller narrative, he does not settle on an individual protagonist, but on a small group. Such a choice fulfills two functions. First, he shows that only by working in a group are the characters able to effect any change; fragmented, they will be defeated. Second, focusing on a group allows Žilnik to present a variety of ideological perspectives of the workers. The same, importantly, happens on the side of the capitalists: they are

186

Ewa Mazierska

a heterogeneous class and succeed only when united around their common interests and strategy. The term which comes to mind to describe the actions of Žilnik’s characters is that which he used in Early Works, evoking Brecht – political theater – but which, in my view, even better suits this film. He represents marches, demonstrations, occupations of public grounds, public discussions, and other such public events as a theater of life played for the sake of the audience and the actors themselves, who in this way assert their importance and indeed their very existence. Participating in this theater makes the actors realize what unites and what divides them. Indeed, Žilnik diverts from the socialist realist cliché that workers act together because they share the same interests and tries to identify the reasons that they might not achieve unity. One disagreement concerns the assessment of the communist past. For some of them it was the time when workers enjoyed a good life; the end of Yugoslavia and the advent of Milošević’s regime changed it all. Others, however, see in Tito’s rule the root of the current problems, either because self-management was not socialist or not capitalist enough. Equally, some praise capitalism as a system where workers have a better life than in Yugoslavia, pointing to West Germany and the United States as places where ordinary people have a good life. Others mention poverty in capitalist Africa to counterpoint this argument. They agree, however, that the current law in Serbia is on the side of the rich to the extent it never was before and they have to fight to change it. The Serbian capitalists, as represented in the film, on the other hand, produced through privatization of cooperatively owned enterprises, have to fend off the demanding workers and to ensure that their businesses flourish against a background of growing economic and political instability, in Serbia and globally. For that, they need to navigate the murky waters of military and mafia capitalism. We see that the owners of the bankrupt factories employ a large number of bodyguards, a kind of private army to resist any attempts at redistribution, try to corrupt the local officials to ensure that their products are bought by the state (what elsewhere is termed politely public–private partnership), and seek support from Russian tycoons. Post-communist Russia represents for them the ideal model of business, marked by high returns on investment, wellembedded “public–private” partnership, and luxurious lifestyles for Russian businessmen. The situation depicted by the director chimes with the views of authors such as Antonio Negri and David Harvey that under neoliberal conditions the boundary between honest and dishonest business becomes blurred; the capitalists become, as Harvey puts it, “feral” (Harvey, 2011). At the same time, the misery and conflict they cause forces them to invest heavily in security to ensure their private safety and that the search for surplus value remains unimpeded. Although the material status of the two groups are very different, the lives of both are marked by insecurity and lack of control and understanding of the world. They do not know what the future will bring them, because they depend on the forces larger than themselves, most centrally the global flow of capital. For this reason, many of them regard the visit by the American Vice President Biden to Serbia in 2009, which in reality took place, and is shown in the film, as contributing to their prosperity or fall more than their own entrepreneurial skills.



Old School Capitalism in Post-Socialism

187

Figure 8.2  Factory owner and associates kidnapped by anarchists in Old School Capitalism (Želimir Žilnik, 2009, produced by Playground Produkcija).

Žilnik brings the two groups together during the workers’ attempt to take possession of their factory, stolen from them during privatization. They dismantle some of the factory buildings in order to sell the bricks and go to their boss’s house to demand that he pays their salaries. This strategy does not bring the expected outcome as the capitalist is not at home and all they get are bags of groceries from his wife, which can be viewed as a symbol of neoliberal charity. Subsequently a group of young anarchists approach the disgruntled workers claiming that its members share the workers’ objectives. The workers challenge them to kidnap the factory owner and his associates to prove that they are on their side, which the anarchists do (Figure 8.2). These events were all scripted by Žilnik and played by amateurs whom the director encountered when shooting his documentaries. Unlike fiction cinema, which focuses on dramatic action, on this occasion the most dramatic event, capturing the capitalists, is underplayed: as an amateur performance. The anarchists approach the men camping on the outskirts of their town, put sacks over their heads, and push them away in wheelbarrows. The last capitalist is captured near his house and they use a car but again, unlike in American gangster films, the action and its filming comes across as amateur. This is conveyed by the “actors” using an old car, and the director a shaky and frequently out of focus camera, as if there was a particular rapport between the amateurism of the two groups. Thanks to such means, however, Žilnik conveys the sense of immediacy and authenticity of the action of his protagonists and his own position as an author who has no script, no template with which to approach this situation, but has to learn about its meanings on the spot. Such an impression is augmented by the way various temporal planes intermingle. First there is the action (in the present tense) and then there is its explanation by referring to earlier events. For example, only after one of

188

Ewa Mazierska

the businessmen was captured by the anarchists and then released by his private army, do we learn how the anarchists got the funds to undertake their action. This forces Žilnik to travel to the United States, as the anarchists’ benefactor turns out to be a Serbian man, who left Yugoslavia many years previously, and decided to return to Serbia following the Wall Street crash and general instability in the United States. He comes to repay his son, whom he abandoned in the 1970s, and the son uses his inheritance to support the anarchists. Such a structure can be seen as adhering to Marx’s idea about the primacy of action over theory. It is difficult to judge how much time passed between the events. As Žilnik does not use any typical means to indicate that the action is moving from one temporal plane to another or from one place to another, he gives the impression that the events he represents happen here and there or that he condensed the history of the working-class struggle into one day. This effect, which rarely happens in contemporary cinema, evokes some early Soviet films, most importantly of Aleksandr Medvedkin, and Tout va bien (1972) by Jean-Luc Godard, a film with a similar storyline of capturing a capitalist during a momentous period in the country’s history (in this case France). It is worth mentioning that the man who returns to Serbia from the United States is played by Lazar Stojanović, best known as a director of Plasticni Isus (Plastic Jesus, 1971), the longest-banned film in Yugoslavia. Most likely Žilnik invited him to play this role because Stojanović is a dedicated liberal and anti-communist. The fact that his son is played by Branimir Jovanović, the Belgrade philosopher who entertains a completely opposite ideological stance, brings an Oedipal dimension into their ideological dispute. Reading metaphorically, communism is presented as a disobedient son of capitalism. The most dramatic part of the film takes place in a disused factory where the redundant workers exchange their views with the businessmen. The workers complain about being robbed of the fruit of their work, when their factory was privatized, not being paid for months, having barely enough to live on, and working in jobs which do not suit their qualifications. The capitalists, on the other hand, point to the forces of global capitalism, which made the workers’ tools and their skills obsolete and decimated the bosses’ profit. For them, the only way to improve the conditions of all of them is through putting everybody’s faith in capitalism – invest more and work more in hope of future returns. Such an idea is rejected by the anarchists who encourage the workers to get rid of the capitalists and self-manage by creating a cooperative on the ruins of the factory. However, this idea is not fulfilled, because the bodyguards free their boss and his associates. In the meantime, the leader of the anarchists is taken to jail for publicly burning an American flag. The workers agree to work in a new enterprise of their dishonest boss, this time on a large farm, which is another privatized cooperative. Their trajectory, as represented in the film, is thus of downgrading – from employment as highly skilled workers in a factory producing means of production, which represented a privileged sector under the socialist rule, to agricultural workers, always being at the bottom of the pile, as much under socialist, as under neoliberal conditions, through the periods of



Old School Capitalism in Post-Socialism

189

non-work. We also learn that for the agricultural workers conditions are especially precarious: they have to work from dawn till dusk, again not knowing when and if they will be paid. The privatized farm becomes the scene of a final tragedy: the leader of the group of anarchists, who comes there to encourage the workers to resume their fight, is killed by a plough operated by a worker, at the request of the owner of the farm. The capitalist asks the workers to carry on with their tasks and keep the murder secret or risk being prosecuted for murder and, reluctantly, they give in to his demand. Symbolism is added to this scene by the previously mentioned similarity between the actor playing the anarchist and Marx. His death thus can be interpreted as killing the hope for a radical change in Serbia, ex-Yugoslavia, and the world at large. The pessimistic ending harks back to one of Žilnik’s most famous films, the ­previously mentioned documentary about homeless people, Black Film, which finishes with the director’s admission that he is unable to help his characters. Again, such an admission points to the need of political action (proper) to effect changes in the real world. In conclusion, I want to reiterate my point that Želimir Žilnik’s work in general and Old School Capitalism in particular successfully combines micro with macroanalysis, presenting workers in one factory as emblematic for the country and global order at large. Moreover, despite using some devices pertaining to fiction cinema, Old School Capitalism produces a compelling “documentary effect.” It gives the impression that the people filmed by Žilnik took part in the events he represented and the director was as surprised by their development as they themselves were. Moreover, the film does not provide us with a happy ending, still a common feature of fiction cinema, or, indeed, even a sense of closure. Finally, the film instills in me a desire to oppose the neoliberal order – in my writing, my workplace, and in other places where communities are forged.

Notes 1 I am grateful to Nebojša Jovanović for useful suggestions about revising this article. 2 However, it is argued that this power was largely illusory. The ordinary workers were ­allowed to express their views about how their factories should be run, but their management was in the hands of the privileged few, who made decisions disregarding the views from the shop floor (Ćurčić, 2009: 194–197). 3 This point is difficult to prove due to the lack of verifiable data about the budgets of films and the fact that Eastern European currency was not convertible. 4 The right name of this movement is the subject of a debate (Jovanović, 2011).

References Allcock, J.B. (2000) Explaining Yugoslavia. London: Hurst & Co. Bazin, A. (1971) What Is Cinema?, vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press.

190

Ewa Mazierska

Beganović, D. (2012) Changing Fates: The Role of the Hero in Yugoslav Cinema in the Early and Late Sixties. In Šuber, D. and Karamanić, S. (eds.) Retracing Images: Visual Culture after Yugoslavia, pp. 135–148. Leiden: Brill. Buden, B. (2012) Shoot It Black! An Introduction to Želimir Žilnik. In Kirn, G., Sekulic, D., and Testen, Ž. (eds.) Surfing the Black: Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and Its Trangressive Moments, pp. 170–179. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie. Burawoy, M. and Lukács, J. (1992) The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary’s Road to Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Conquest, R. (1966) Introduction. In Djilas, M., The New Class, pp. 1–10. London: Unwin. Ćurčić, B. (2009) The Paradigm of Fragility of the Workers’ Issue in (Post-) Socialist Yugoslavia: Elementary School of Capitalism – On Želimir Žilnik’s latest film actions. In Ćurčić et al. (eds.) For an Idea – Against the Status Quo: Analysis and Systematization of Želimir Žilnik’s Artistic Practice, pp. 192–203. Novi Sad: Centar za nove medije. DeCuir, Jr., G. (2010) Old School Capitalism: An Interview with Zelimir Zilnik. Cineaste, http://www.cineaste.com/articles/emold-school-capitalismem-an-interview-with-­ zelimir-zilnik-web-exclusive, accessed July 24, 2014. Dimitrijević, B. (2009) Behind Scepticism Lies the Fire of a Revolutionary! (Part One: Želimir Žilnik and the “Existence of Possibility”). In Ćurčić, B. et al. (eds.) For an Idea – Against the Status Quo: Analysis and Systematization of Želimir Žilnik’s Artistic Practice, pp. 138–151. Novi Sad: Centar za nove medije. Dimitrijević, B. (2010) Concrete Analysis of Concrete Situations: Marxist Education According to Želimir Žilnik. Afterall, 25, http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.25/concrete-analysisof-concrete-situations-marxist-education-according-to-elimir-ilnik, accessed July 23, 2014. Djilas, M. (1966) The New Class. London: Unwin. Engels, F. (2009) The Condition of the Working Class in England [1845]. London: Penguin. Goulding, D.J. (1992) Yugoslavia. In Slater, T.J. (ed.) Handbook of Soviet and East European Films and Filmmakers, pp. 185–228. New York: Greenwood Press. Harrington, M. (1974) Leisure as the Means of Production. In Kolakowski, L. and Hampshire, S. (eds.) The Socialist Idea: A Reappraisal, pp. 153–163. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Harvey, D. (2011) Feral Capitalism Hits the Streets. Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey, http://davidharvey.org/2011/08/feral-capitalism-hits-the-streets, accessed July 24, 2014. Jovanović, N. (2011) Breaking the Wave: A Commentary on “Black Wave Polemics: Rhetoric as Aesthetic” by Greg DeCuir, Jr. Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 2(2), 161–173. Kideckel, D.A. (2002) The Unmaking of an East-Central European Working Class. In Hann, C.M. (ed.) Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, pp. 114–132. London: Routledge. Kirn, G. (2010) From the Primacy of Partisan Politics to the Post-Fordist Tendency in Yugoslav Self-Management Socialism. In Kirn, G. (ed.) Post-Fordism and Its Discontents, pp. 253–302. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie. Lenin, V.I. (1965) Collected Works, vol. 27 [1918]. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Levi, P. (2007) Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and PostYugoslav Cinema. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1947) The German Ideology, Parts I and III. New York: International Publishers. Mortimer, L. (2009) Terror and Joy: The Films of Dušan Makavejev. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Norman, D. (1955) Marx and Soviet Reality. London: Batchworth Press.

9

Capturing the Labors of Sex Work

The Pedagogical Role of Documentary Film Anna E. Ward

While debates concerning the sex industry have generated an impressive body of scholarship, representations of sex work in documentary film have garnered surprisingly little scholarly attention. The sex industry has grown increasingly more complex, and attention to issues of sex trafficking and sexual slavery has renewed debates over the nature of sexual labor. There is no shortage of recent documentary films that examine the sex industry through the lens of crime, deviancy, violence, and human trafficking; films such as Bought and Sold (1997), Trading Women (2002), Sold in America (2009), and Nepal’s Stolen Children (2011), all focus on sex trafficking and systems of coerced sexual labor. At the same time, increasingly vocal organizations of sex workers are demanding recognition of their labor as legitimate work, struggling to articulate how already existing policies and new polices can improve their working conditions. In this chapter, I examine documentary representations that seek to frame sexual labor as legitimate work and highlight labor issues within the sex industry, focusing primarily on the films Live Nude Girls Unite! (Query and Funari, US, 2000), Tales of the Night Fairies (Ghosh, India, 2002), and Scarlet Road (Scott, Australia, 2011). The chapter begins with a discussion of the history of representations of sex work in documentary film and television and then moves to an examination of the sex industry and the nature of sex work within it. As Ronald Weitzer explains, “Sex work involves the exchange of sexual services, performances, or products for material compensation,” including “direct physical contact between buyers and sellers (prostitution, lap dancing) as well as indirect sexual stimulation (pornography, stripping, telephone sex, live sex shows, erotic webcam performances)” (2000: 1). Along with other scholars, I position sex work as using immaterial labor, A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

192

Anna E. Ward

a type of labor that has become a fundamental component of global capitalism. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri define immaterial labor as “labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication” (2000: 290). Sex work can also be understood as “biopolitical production in that it directly produces social relationships and forms of life” (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 110). Scholars Wendy Chapkis (1997), Katherine Frank (2002), and R. Danielle Egan (2006) all highlight the emotional labor involved in sex work. Melissa Ditmore (2007), drawing on the work of Maurizio Lazzarato, frames sex work as a form of affective labor. All of this research highlights the need to reorient our thinking in regard to understanding the parallels between sex work and other types of work. The growing importance of service-related industries globally necessitates a reconceptualization of how workers position themselves in relation to occupations where a worker’s performance is the product being sold, and documentary film can play an important part in this project. As Elizabeth Cowie notes, the documentary camera has a long-held fascination with representing the laboring body in motion, whether this be in early twentieth-century “industrials” or John Grierson’s influential films and those they inspired (2011: 64–65). Rather than lingering on images of laboring bodies in motion, however, the films discussed below frame sex work as work by distinguishing work from non-work, often dramatizing the difference and transition between the two. “For actions and activities to be understood as work,” Cowie explains, “a documentary film must characterize them as such, drawing on conventional definitions either explicitly or implicitly … thus distinguishing them from other actions that are deemed not to be work” (2011: 61, emphasis added). By visually highlighting differences between working life and non-working life, the documentary filmmakers discussed below enable a critical distinction between sex work and coerced sexual labor, creating a representational contrast to images of sex slavery and other activities that should not be codified as work. In focusing on the working life of sex workers, the documentary films discussed below can be understood as political documentaries in the sense that Paula Rabinowitz suggests, identifying social problems and suggesting alternatives, but also “serving another representative function – that of self-definition” (1994: 11). Through documentary film, a marginalized group, as both creators and participants, “represents itself to itself – an act of identity – as it represents its positions to a wider community – an act of recruitment” (1994: 11–12). Documenting different sectors of the sex industry, and different national contexts, the films discussed below exemplify a documentary approach that foregrounds the labor of sex work and highlights the efforts on the part of sex workers to address the needs of their communities. These films perform an important pedagogical and political function, encouraging the creation of activist identities around sex work for both workers and viewers, positioning sex work as work and sex workers as political agents, both within documentary content and outside of it, advocating on their own behalf to improve their working conditions.



Capturing the Labors of Sex Work

193

Working Hard for the Image The earliest films featuring hardcore content to be screened in theaters in the United States were documentaries, with themes exploring the pornography industry in other countries and “exposés” on massage parlors (Williams, 1989: 97). These documentaries took advantage of changes in US law, particularly several Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s that provided First Amendment protection for representations with “redeeming social importance.” The documentary form allowed both filmmakers and audiences to safely interrogate sexuality explicitly on screen. Television has also relied on the informational or investigative lens in order to provide explicit sexual content. Jane Arthurs documents a boom in what she terms “docuporn,” or “cheaply produced ‘investigations’ of sexuality” in British television programming in the late 1990s and early 2000s (2004: 94). In both Britain and the United States, these programs have included reality television shows that feature individuals working within sex industries, shows like CatHouse, G String Divas, The Girls Next Door, and Family Business. Programming also includes investigative exposés of the sex industry, often featuring undercover accounts of prostitution and sex trafficking. While these programs vary widely in terms of their investigative value, Arthurs argues that some of these programs provide sensationalistic representations through questionable means. The means by which images are captured – the undercover lens – mimic the exploitative context the program is meant to highlight and provides its own form of voyeuristic titillation (Arthurs, 2004: 105). Arthurs’s argument is not only applicable to television or to the undercover lens. An early precursor to contemporary behind-the-scenes documentary investigations into sex work is Bonnie Sherr Klein’s film Not a Love Story: A Motion Picture about Pornography (Canada, 1981). Despite the subtitle, Klein’s camera sets its sights on not just pornography, but the sex industry more broadly, including footage of a strip club and a live peep show. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada’s (NFB) Studio D, the first publicly funded women’s film studio, Not a Love Story offers a behind-the-scenes journey into the sex industry in order to reveal its damaging consequences on society and women, in particular. The film presented to a mainstream audience a perspective on the sex industry that was gaining increasing traction among one strong sector of feminist activists and scholars. While the film was one of the NFB’s most successful releases, it also sparked considerable controversy. The film offers what B. Ruby Rich calls a “sophisticated form of voyeurism,” a voyeurism not altogether different from that which the filmmakers purport to critique. Klein’s camera mimics the objectifying gaze the film hopes to trouble, aligning the film audience with the perspective of the (male) customer and pornography viewer rather than the (female) sex worker. The result is that “[the audience] remain voyeurs, and [the sex workers] remain objects – whether of our pity, lust, respect, or shock makes little difference” (Rich, 1983: 59). Ultimately, Not a Love Story fails to consider how its status as documentary film stands in relation to the issues of women’s power, male voyeurism, and even (cinematic) violence it takes up. This critique is particularly important given sex workers’ marginalized status, and the negative

194

Anna E. Ward

portrayals of sex workers that dominate mainstream media. Documentary filmmakers employing a sex workers’ rights perspective take issue with the characterization of sex work by anti-prostitution strains of feminist activism and scholarship that identify pornography and prostitution as both emblematic of and contributory to women’s subordination and advocate abolition through various means. Though varied, this perspective typically views sex work as gendered exploitation, violence against women, and a violation of human rights, the perspective put forth in Not a Love Story. The film Born into Brothels (Briski and Kauffman, US, 2004), though not focused on sex work per se, is a contemporary example of this same sort of problematic documentary representation of sex work. Born into Brothels focuses on the lives of a group of children of sex workers living in Sonagachi, Kolkata, as they learn photography and document their lives. While the children’s photographs are featured throughout the film, the primary narrative tension revolves around Briski’s attempt to remove the children from the brothels and place them in boarding schools. Briski positions herself as a benevolent force of change in contradistinction to the children’s families, their communities, and Indian authorities. The sex workers in the film emerge in the narrative as vectors of negative intervention into the children’s lives and Briski’s efforts; the film performs a double delegitimation of the sex workers – the women in the film are delegitimized as workers and as mothers. The sex workers’ labor in Sonagachi’s informal economy of the brothels is positioned in the film as directly inhibiting their performance of the labor of childrearing; for example, images of the sex workers getting ready for work are cut with images of the children performing chores, and multiple references are made to the children having to either leave their homes when the women are working or, at times, be present while their mothers entertain clients. Briski’s insistence on removing the children from the brothels is depicted as a reaction to their present circumstances, but also as a necessary intervention into an inevitable future that has not yet arrived. In particular, Briski hopes to prevent the young girls in the film from ending up “on the line.” Despite Kolkata having one of the most robust sex worker activist organizations in the world, the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, sex work activism is conspicuously absent from the film. The only viable solution to sex work presented in Born into Brothels is to never enter into it; the only redeemable sex worker is a sex worker who has not yet become one. Both Born into Brothels and Not a Love Story perpetuate a dynamic of feminist documentary filmmaker as rescuer, particularly troubling given the filmmakers’ positions of privilege as compared to the subjects of their films. The increased focus on sex trafficking and sexual slavery in contemporary political and legal debates internationally has only further fueled a troubling representational politics of sex work. Carol Vance likens anti-trafficking representation to the generic conventions of melodrama: “Classic melodrama’s anticipation of and satisfaction with rescue as the plot’s denouement is most compatible with the state’s rescue of women through criminal laws and increased state power” (2010: 139). Activist efforts to address sex trafficking, Johan Lindquist explains, face the



Capturing the Labors of Sex Work

195

challenge of how to capture and convey the nature and scope of the problem they purport to address given that trafficking is a “hidden” economy. Representation, Lindquist argues, is critically important in establishing not just that trafficking demands action, but also that trafficking exists at all. Documentary film provides both proof of exploitation through testimonials of formerly trafficked persons and a rationale for intervention in the form of rescue (Lindquist, 2010: 233). Documentary television and film has played a key role in shaping public perception of trafficking in terms of its scope and generating support and momentum for antitrafficking policies.1 Just as anti-trafficking organizations have used film as a key platform for their efforts, organizations dedicated to the rights of sex workers have positioned documentary film as an important component of their political initiatives and as an invaluable resource for coalition building, collective action, and information and skill sharing. While political organizing in opposition to sex work has a long history, political organizing for and by sex workers is a comparatively recent phenomenon, emerging in many countries in the 1970s and 80s. Sex work activists seek to frame prostitution and other forms of sexual labor as legitimate forms of work, challenging criminalization and social stigmatization. Activists contend that sex work can be freely entered into, or at least as freely as other forms of labor, and can be a fulfilling and socially useful occupation. Even in contexts in which the work is not experienced as fulfilling or ideal, it still may be a rational choice amongst a limited range of options. The exploitative dimensions of sex work are largely due to its precarious legal status, according to sex work activists, or are dimensions of capitalist labor more generally.2 For many activists, the solution to exploitative conditions is to decriminalize the sex industry, change public perceptions of sex work, enforce existing labor regulations and develop new protections as necessary, and promote organizing amongst sex workers, making alliances with other labor groups. Documentary film can play an important pedagogical role in educating audiences about these goals and challenge mainstream representations that position sex work as inextricably bound up with abject poverty, violence, degradation, and coercion. While these issues are a troubling part of the lives of some sex workers, documentary representations of sex work often collapse them into a direct and necessary relation. The growing importance of service-related industries globally necessitates a reconceptualization of how workers position themselves in relation to forms of labor where a worker’s performance, whether intimate, cognitive, creative, affective, or a combination thereof, is the product being sold. Coined by US-based activist Carol Leigh, a.k.a. Scarlet Harlot, the term “sex work” was offered in response to a feminist conference workshop with a title that used the phrase “Sex Use Industry.”3 As Leigh later recalled, “How could I sit amid other women as a political equal when I was being objectified like that, described only as something used, obscuring my role as an actor and agent in this transaction?” (2004: 69). Anti-prostitution feminists often assert that the selling of sex requires the selling of one’s body, a transaction that necessarily alienates women from their sexuality and thus their personhood. Carol Pateman argues, “[O]nly through the prostitution contract does the buyer obtain

196

Anna E. Ward

unilateral right of direct sexual use of a woman’s body” (1999: 60). Many sex workers object to this characterization, arguing that what is sold are delimited interactions and services, not unmediated access to the body. Indeed, debates over terminology cannot be separated from the quagmire of philosophical, political, and legal debates regarding the nature of sexual labor. For anti-prostitution feminist activists and scholars, framing prostitution as “work” is itself an argument that diminishes critiques of sexual labor as exploitation. For example, Melissa Farley argues, “In that one word – work – we lose ground in the political struggle to understand prostitution as violence against women” (2006: 124). For sex workers’ rights activists, to frame a practice as work need not imply that the work is always undertaken in ideal conditions, free from exploitation, abuse, or inequality. Given the extensive critiques of conditions of labor under capitalism, it is strange to assume that situating a practice as work means to imply that it is free from exploitative conditions. “Work” denotes the type of activity, not the conditions under which it is performed. Exploitation, abuse, and inequality are the hallmarks of most forms of labor within contemporary global capitalism. The conditions that most sex workers face are endemic to the systems of which they are a part, not a product of sex work per se. Like other types of immaterial labor, sex work is often marked by certain levels of precariousness. As Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt explain, “Precariousness (in relation to work) refers to all forms of insecure, contingent, flexible work – from illegalized, casualized and temporary employment, to homeworking, piecework and freelancing” (2008: 3). Given this precariousness, as well as the stigma that sex workers face within most cultures, it can be especially difficult to cultivate self-identification as a sex worker. Much like traditional forms of labor advocacy require embracing an identity as a worker within a larger group of workers with shared interests, the articulation of sex workers’ rights necessitates identification as a sex worker with shared interests with a larger community of other sex workers. Documentary film is a critical, yet often overlooked, aspect of sex work activism as it can facilitate identification, collective organizing, and alliances with other labor groups, helping to combat the precariousness that often marks sexual labor.

Collective Organizing in Live Nude Girls Unite! Live Nude Girls Unite! (Query and Funari, 2000) documents the unionizing efforts of erotic dancers at the Lusty Lady in San Francisco. The Lusty Lady features a live peep show; the main stage, a mirrored room with dancing poles, is lined on one side by 13 individual viewing booths. When customers deposit coins or bills in their booth, a viewing window opens up, allowing customers to watch the action of the dancers on stage behind a glass partition. Customers can also pay a higher rate to use a separate “Private Pleasures” booth in order to engage one-on-one with a dancer, though still behind a partition. Live Nude Girls Unite! weaves the story of the dancers’ unionizing efforts with the personal narrative of one of the filmmakers, Julia Query, a stand-up comedian as well as a dancer at the Lusty Lady. Query’s stand-up



Capturing the Labors of Sex Work

197

routines, in which she discusses her work as an erotic dancer, are interspersed throughout the film, in addition to photos from her childhood and video footage of her interactions with her mother. Dancers at the Lusty Lady began collectively organizing in response to the club’s policies regarding scheduling practices, sick days, wages, and management’s failure to enforce customer policies, particularly the policy against videotaping or photographing the dancers. Three of the viewing booths had one-way mirrors, making it especially easy for customers to videotape and photograph the dancers without their knowledge. The dancers also objected to management’s race-based scheduling practices. Only one dancer of color was scheduled per shift, reducing the overall number of shifts available to women of color at the club, and African-American dancers were never scheduled time in the “Private Pleasures” booth, a more lucrative gig than dancing on the main stage. These issues led to growing frustration amongst the dancers, and they decided to pursue unionization in order to gain greater bargaining power with management. Service Employees International Union, Local 790, agreed to represent the dancers. The documentary highlights the painfully slow negotiation process between the dancers and management over the terms of their contract. A key issue that emerges during contract negotiations is the nature of the work itself. Management’s legal representation informs the dancers that they would like the job to be described in the contract preamble as “fun” and characterized the job as a “part-time, temporary job where you don’t have to work very hard.” In one of Query’s stand-up routines, she quips, “Do they do that to the steelworkers?” Fueled by a comical juxtaposition of the gendered connotations of steelwork and “fun,” the punch-line’s inclusion within the film also serves to draw lines of affinity between erotic dancers and other workers, both in terms of their status as workers, but also between the dancers’ labor battle and the history of American union organizing. The irony, of course, is that the Lusty Lady dancers sought unionization after decades of sharp decline in union membership in the United States. While the filmmakers attempt to position the dancers’ efforts as a continuation of the legacy of union organizing, they do so knowing full well that their audience may have a tenuous connection to this history. This is evidenced by the insertion of an animated sequence explaining the difference between open and closed shop agreements into the film. Nevertheless, the filmmakers attempt to resuscitate the image of the embattled union worker as a component of the American national imaginary. In addition, while some dancers may be temporary and/or part-time, and some dancers may experience the job as “fun” at times, the film underscores how this characterization attempts to delegitimize the nature of the work, thus delegitimizing workers’ demands for fair and respectful working conditions. In addition to drawing an affinity between the dancers’ organizing and the history of unions, the film inserts sex work activism into a historical and generational trajectory of social justice organizing. In the opening sequence of the film, Query narrates a version of her younger self, specifically positioning her entrance into the world in relation to the US civil rights movement and her upbringing by her feminist mother. “I was born in 1968, the day before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

198

Anna E. Ward

My mom raised me to believe in freedom, justice, and equality for all. I dreamed of fighting the good fight.” This narration is juxtaposed with images of a child’s hand filling in a coloring book image of Martin Luther King, Jr. and still photos of Query’s childhood. An important narrative arc in the film is Query’s relationship with her mother, Dr. Joyce Wallace, a doctor renowned for her outreach work with street prostitutes. Query reveals early on in the film that her mother is unaware that her daughter works in the sex industry, a situation that provides narrative tension throughout much of the documentary. The use of this situation as narrative tension is made explicit to the audience when Query explains on camera to another dancer, “I’m planning on telling my mom mainly because I think she’s going to find out, and also because I think it’s a plot device for the documentary.” Here, Query reflexively draws attention to the documentary and her role as agent in propelling the action of the documentary narrative along. This is not the only moment in the film in which the documentary itself becomes the object of scrutiny. Whereas Klein’s camera puts the film viewer in the position of the stage viewer in Not a Love Story without problematizing this gaze, Query and Funari use the mirrored surfaces of the Lusty Lady’s stage walls to reflect Query holding the camera back to the film audience. We see ourselves looking and, in return, we see Query looking back at us. There are two interwoven narrative resolutions to the story – Dr. Wallace’s acceptance, albeit limited, of what her daughter does for a living, and the dancers finally negotiating a contract with management. By weaving these two narrative threads together throughout the documentary, the filmmakers posit these resolutions as related. A generational schism between Query and her mother is introduced in the film, positioning Query’s mother as emblematic of a feminist perspective that views sex work as a form of gender inequality sustained by coercion and limited economic opportunities for women. While Dr. Wallace has dedicated a lifetime to providing outreach to sex workers, she does so, in part, with the hope of ultimately helping sex workers exit out of the industry. When Query reveals that she is a dancer at the Lusty Lady (Figure  9.1), her mother’s immediate response is relatively supportive; however, the audience witnesses her mother becoming increasingly upset by Query’s revelation and uncomfortable being on camera. In voice-over narration as her mother is shown walking away, Query notes that her mother “drove away and didn’t return my calls for three months” after this conversation. The camera then cuts to television monitors on an airplane displaying only static, gesturing towards the communicative breakdown between Query and her mother. The narrative then switches back to the bargaining table where, after intense negotiations with management, the workers vote to unionize. The final sequence of the film features Query and her mother back in the same room together. Sitting on a couch next to her daughter, her mother concedes, “I’m glad that she empowered or helped to empower these women to make their working conditions better. I like to see it as a civil liberties issue.” Query’s union activism functions in the film narrative as a tentative resolution to the objections of feminist critiques of sex work, suggesting that the improvement of working conditions can alleviate feminist concerns about the potentially exploitative nature of the



Capturing the Labors of Sex Work

199

Figure 9.1  Query reveals to her mother that she works at the Lusty Lady. Live Nude Girls Unite! (J. Query and V. Funari, 2000, produced by J. Query and J. Montoya, Red Light Films).

work. Live Nude Girls Unite! redoubles this potential for resolution through the pedagogical function of the documentary itself.

Sex Work and Activism in Tales of the Night Fairies Shohini Ghosh’s Tales of the Night Fairies (2002) highlights five brothel-based sex workers, four women and one man, and their work with the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) in West Bengal, India. Ghosh establishes her own positionality early in the film through voice-over narration, explaining that she grew up in Kolkata in the “decent, respectable neighborhoods” where the streets of the red-light district “eluded” her. Her encounters with sex workers as a child were encounters with the sex workers of cinema, the Bollywood representations of sex workers, and the film posters that pepper Kolkata’s landscape. The documentary’s soundtrack includes music from the cinema, including films featuring story-lines about sex workers.4 Ghosh’s gestures toward Indian cinema, both through narration and music, underscore the important role that representation plays in shaping understandings of sex work. In addition, they highlight the circulation of images of sex workers as part of the Indian national imaginary, a circulation that is fueled, in part, by global circuits of capital and often exists in tension with the state and its attempts to delimit sex workers’ rights.

200

Anna E. Ward

Importantly, Ghosh’s lens is not confined to the brothels. The camera follows as the sex workers move through the streets of Kolkata, shop at markets, and participate in a range of cultural activities. Whereas the camera in Born into Brothels provokes a sense of claustrophobia, emphasizing the constraint of the red-light district’s built environments by lingering on narrow stairways and tight corridors, Ghosh’s lens consistently frustrates the representation of the brothels as spaces of constraint. Her decision to blur the line between the red-light areas and the rest of the city visually registers the movement of both sex workers and their clients across boundaries. The subjects of Ghosh’s film lead the camera through the city, deftly navigating through the built environment and its inhabitants. Unlike Live Nude Girls Unite!, the film audience never sees the labors of sex work in Tales of the Night Fairies; we do not see the subjects of the film on the line, or interacting with their clients. Given intense international scrutiny of India’s red-light districts, and the pervasive circulation of images of its brothels and the women and men who work in them, Ghosh’s decision to withhold this access is notable. In addition to her subjects’ narrative descriptions of their lives, Ghosh relies on another method of framing sex work as work, a method that all of the films highlighted in this chapter deploy to some degree. Paradoxically, Ghosh highlights sex work as work by foregrounding aspects of her subjects’ lives that are not work. One of the more insidious assumptions about sex work, particularly brothel-based sex work, is that it defines people’s lives in a way that other forms of labor do not. By drawing attention to other areas of life such as leisure, family life, and activism, Ghosh manages to demarcate sex work as work by shoring up distinctions between working life and other modes of engaging in the world. While these areas of life certainly overlap, they are not the same. Just as Ghosh resists depicting the built environment of brothels as a space of constraint, she also resists depicting the labor of sex work as a totalizing force in workers’ lives or sense of selves. We do see extensive footage of the sex workers’ activism as they canvass the red-light district doing outreach. Given sex work’s delegitimized status as work, sex workers must constantly negotiate their precarious legal status in order to make a living. By focusing on activism, Ghosh encourages the audience to consider how public policies contribute to the working conditions that sex workers face, and consider the multiple identities of the subjects of her film as workers and activists. This is further underscored by the extensive footage of the Sexworkers Millennium Carnival, a multi-day cultural event organized by the DMSC, held in 2001 at the Salt Lake Stadium in Kolkata. The event featured a range of cultural programming, including dance and theater, intended to highlight issues pertaining to sex work. The subjects of the film come into view as not just sex workers, and not just activists engaged in direct action with state authorities, but also as gifted entertainers who recognize the power of cultural productions to shape public perception. Just as Ghosh’s deployment of Indian cinema recognizes the complex interplay of representation within the national imaginary, the DMSC also understands this dynamic and skillfully deploys Indian cultural repertoires to advance their goals. While Ghosh’s film strikes a resolutely positive tone, the film does not sidestep dynamics of violence and coercion within the sex work industry. Indeed, several of



Capturing the Labors of Sex Work

201

Figure 9.2  “What makes you think that a sexworker would confide in a non-sex worker?” Tales of the Night Fairies (S. Ghosh, 2002, produced by Centre for Feminist Legal Research and MAMACASH, Under Construction).

the sex workers acknowledge on camera that they were initially coerced into sex work at a very young age. The question the film raises, however, is whether sex workers who have initially entered the industry through coercion necessarily want to exit out of it, complicating discourses of rescue and rehabilitation. The film also highlights the work of the DMSC in trying to establish self-regulatory boards to curtail the entrance of minors into the industry, provoking the audience to consider the possibility that sex workers may be in the best position to regulate their industry as opposed to state authorities or outside NGOs. While Ghosh seeks out the sex workers’ stories, her film frustrates the expectation that documentary can provide direct access to the lives of its subjects. Early in the narrative, one of the sex workers, Mala Singh, states unequivocally, “Only a sexworker can understand another sexworker’s problems.” This sentiment is reinforced later in the film when another sex worker recounts to Ghosh a story of a frustrating encounter with a non-sex worker at a conference. She recalls asking the woman, “What makes you think that a sexworker would confide in a non-sex worker?” (Figure 9.2). These two moments signal to the audience that the stories unfolding in the film are not meant to provide unmediated access or transparency. While these statements assume a commonality among all sex workers, a commonality that likely does not exist, they nevertheless indicate the importance of identification and solidarity between sex workers to members of the DMSC. Part of the DMSC’s success is, no doubt, due to the cultivation of a strong attachment to the identification as a sex worker among its members and its determination to propel its members to the forefront of political, legal, and cultural debates regarding sex work.

202

Anna E. Ward

The Laboring/Desiring Body in Scarlet Road Scarlet Road (Scott, 2011) profiles the work of Rachel Wotton, an Australian sex worker who specializes in providing services for clients with disabilities. Through the organization Touching Base, Inc., Wotton has played an instrumental role in providing resources for other sex workers to develop expertise in this area. The voices of Wotton, her clients, and other members of the sex work community drive the narrative of the film; there is no voice-over narration or directorial presence. Documentaries such as Scarlet Road trouble prevalent assumptions that the labor of sex work, particularly prostitution, is a form of “unskilled” labor. This film draws attention to niche markets that have developed within certain sectors of sex work, markets that involve the acquisition and marketing of specific sets of skills. In her book Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex, Elizabeth Bernstein tracks changing dynamics of sex work in the United States, Sweden, and the Netherlands, highlighting distinctions among differentiated sexual markets. Of particular interest to Bernstein is the influx of relatively privileged women into sex work and the growing prominence of indoor prostitution in Western countries. She draws a distinction between “modern-industrial prostitution” and “post-industrial sexual commerce” (2007: 170). While Bernstein relies on a problematic temporal framework, she is quick to point out that “modern-industrial” and “post-industrial” prostitution exist side by side within many national contexts and internationally. Modern-industrial prostitution, according to Bernstein, focuses on “quick sexual release,” often negotiated in public and through third-party intermediaries such as pimps or madams. Postindustrial sexual commerce, in contrast, incorporates a “diversified and specialized array of sexual products and services,” often brokered through technological intermediaries such as websites, and involving a more permeable boundary between public and private life. Post-industrial sex workers in the West, according to Bernstein, are typically “white, native-born, and relatively class-privileged” and often describe their work in language that conveys skill and expertise (2007: 75). The sex workers in San Francisco that Bernstein interviewed “spoke explicitly about their deliberate pursuit of special skills as a means of enhancing both their experience of doing sex work and their earning power”; training included “massage certification to yogic breathwork” (2007: 96). In many ways, Wotton fits Bernstein’s characterization of a post-industrial sex worker given her background and her trajectory from reliance on third-party intermediaries to independent status. Wotton is white, relatively class-privileged, and while she has worked in a variety of sectors of the sex industry, she is now independently employed. Whereas most of the dancers featured in Live Nude Girls Unite! frame their entrance into sex work in terms of rational economic choice, Wotton states that she is “one of those sex workers that was always drawn to it,” situating her work outside the parameters of limited economic options. While Wotton’s positionality is certainly not representative of all sex workers in Australia, or sex workers globally for that matter, this is precisely the point. In other words, to say that Wotton is not representative of all sex workers is to invite recognition and examination of highly differentiated markets within the sex industry.



Capturing the Labors of Sex Work

203

Bernstein argues that post-industrial sex workers craft and deploy discourses that differentiate their labor from modern-industrial sex workers, often by articulating specialized skill sets. Wotton certainly champions training and skills acquisition throughout Scarlet Road, both in reference to her own work and through her work with Touching Base. In one scene we see Wotton conducting a training workshop for other sex workers, teaching them skills specific to working with clients with disabilities, including how to work with clients with limited mobility and clients who communicate not through speech, but through eye movements. While Bernstein might characterize Wotton’s development of specific skill sets as a means to differentiate herself in a crowded market, Wotton positions it as arising from the specific needs of her clients. Documentary film rarely focuses on the clients of sex workers, and when it does, clients are often depicted as interchangeable caricatures complicit in processes of exploitation. The film’s focus on Wotton’s clients challenges this characterization, revealing that clients of sex workers are just as diverse as sex workers themselves, seeking out a variety of sexual services for a variety of reasons. The film’s dual focus on Wotton and her clients also ushers in the possibility that some forms of sex work can be understood as existing along a continuum of services, bringing into focus questions regarding precisely what the labor of sex work consists of. Early in the film, the audience is introduced to John Blades, a regular client of Wotton’s. Blades has multiple sclerosis and uses a chin-operated motorized wheelchair for mobility. The audience is given an extraordinary level of access to Blades’s routine as we watch two caregivers assisting him with bathing and dressing. This early scene provides a critical framework for a later scene in the film involving another regular client of Wotton’s, Mark Manitta. Manitta also relies on a motorized wheelchair for mobility and communicates primarily through his eyes and a computer that translates text to speech. In preparation for their night together, the camera follows Wotton as she is trained by Manitta’s mother to operate his lift equipment and assist him with eating. During their night together, the camera lingers as Wotton bathes Manitta, recalling the earlier scene between Blades and his caregivers. Scott’s juxtaposition of these two scenes raises critical questions regarding the labor of sex work and the arguments against it. Arguments against sex work often hinge on a demarcation between public and private, the market and spheres of intimacy. The film highlights that the boundaries that are often drawn between spheres of intimacy and the market are often drawn with normative bodies in mind. The film posits a continuum of care within which sex work can be understood as operating. This becomes quite clear in the film when Blades and Wotton discuss their exchange in therapeutic terms. After their night together, Blades describes the return of physical sensations and functioning he thought he had lost permanently. Wotton remarks, “One good orgasm is better than three sessions with an [occupational therapist] sometimes.” The film also troubles prevailing assumptions regarding intermediaries between sex workers and their clients. In the film, the intermediaries facilitating the sex worker–client relationship include non-profit employees, professional caregivers for people with disabilities, and clients’ family members. Denise Beckwith, an employee with the organization People With Disability Australia, jokes in the film, “People ask

204

Anna E. Ward

me what I do quite often for a living and I go, ‘I pimp for people.’” Touching Base also provides training workshops for professionals in the disability services sector on how to assist their clients in seeking out a sex worker. In addition, Wotton’s interactions with her clients with disabilities in the film are all facilitated in important ways by the clients’ family members. Bernstein’s analysis notes that post-industrial sex workers often are more likely to blur the line between their working lives and their private lives than the “modernindustrial” sex workers she interviewed. The closing scene of the film showcases Touching Base’s “One Decade On” celebration. Attendees of the gathering include Wotton, her boyfriend, several of her clients, and in a few cases, her clients’ mothers. Certainly, this would seem to exemplify the porous boundaries between public and private life that Bernstein notes in her text. However, what Bernstein does not consider within her analysis is that given the complex web of policies and laws that constrict certain aspects of the sex industry, sex workers and clients often find themselves embroiled in the same mesh of regulations and this may serve as a catalyst for political alliance. Scarlet Road highlights a particular case in which sex workers and clients pursue mutually beneficial ends, where the line that is blurred is not necessarily the line between market relationships and non-market relationships as in the case of a sex worker who develops romantic attachments to her or his clients, but rather the line that is blurred is between the market and politics.

Figure 9.3  Sex workers and people with disabilities march together. Scarlet Road (C. Scott, 2011, produced by C. Scott and P. Fiske, Paradigm Pictures).



Capturing the Labors of Sex Work

205

In an early scene in the film, Scott incorporates footage of a Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade in which sex workers, including Wotton, and people with disabilities march together. With banners proclaiming, “Sex workers and people with disabilities come together,” the event signals an overlap between these two communities that extends beyond simply the fact that some sex workers do have disabilities (Figure 9.3). The more fundamental overlap that this collaboration signals is that both sex workers and people with disabilities are often deemed nonnormative in their desires and “unproductive.” Both groups are often seen as a destabilizing threat to heteronormative economies of desire, with sex workers often standing in as representative of sexual excess and people with disabilities standing in as representative of sexual lack or absence. In addition, both groups are often positioned as embodying improper relationships to markets and economies, as bodies outside the bounds of proper, productive, laboring bodies. Scarlet Road raises important questions as to how both groups, with all their various overlaps, can collaborate with one another to challenge our assumptions about what laboring and desiring bodies look like.

Affective Alliances Live Nude Girls Unite!, Tales of the Night Fairies, and Scarlet Road, while documenting three very different sectors of the sex work industry, all highlight the working conditions and labor dynamics in sex workers’ lives. The films do not bypass the challenges that sex workers face, but rather frame these challenges as labor and policy issues and connect these issues to broader economic shifts. Documentary representations of sex work play an important role in legitimating sex work as work and cultivating identification and alliance amongst sex workers. Cowie provides a discussion of the concept of work that is worth quoting at length: Work is not an entity, a thing, or an object. It is a concept, an abstraction that distinguishes and defines a portion of human activity and interaction … As a category of labor, work thus depends on a series of distinctions that are both economic and social (e.g., in the discourse of economics, the product may be material, such as food, steel, or ships, or immaterial, such as a service). “Work” is also constructed by state apparatuses … governmental discourse – realized in the laws enacted by the state, such as maximum hours and minimum wages – defines work. (2011: 60)

Thus, activities become “work,” in part, through social, cultural, political, economic, and legal legitimation. The documentary films highlighted in this chapter enable such a signification. Rather than insisting on characterizing sex work as necessarily exploitative, we might look to sex workers and their labor activism as a model for how to address the exploitative dynamics of immaterial labor more generally, as Ditmore suggests (2007: 184). Through documentary films that examine the labor struggles of sex

206

Anna E. Ward

workers – films that centralize the voices of sex workers and their activism – we may gain insight into our rapidly changing working lives. Documentary film can play an important role in imagining new affective and political alliances to combat evergrowing economic exploitation. “The documentary film,” Cowie argues, “is not only an assemblage of facts and of a filmed reality but also an interpretation that may draw upon established understanding, or it may challenge such ‘interpretations,’ renegotiating established and conventional meanings” (2011: 63). The strategies of the filmmakers discussed above serve as a model for how to “renegotiate established and conventional meanings” of work and its representation in documentary film, particularly given the increasing prominence of affective labor transnationally.

Notes 1 For an excellent analysis of how documentary representations impact policy perspectives, see Carol Vance (2012). 2 See Jenness (1990) and Bernstein (2007). 3 Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media Conference held in 1978 in San Francisco. 4 “Chingari” from the film Amar Prem (Shakti Samanta, 1972) and “Meri Jaan” from Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulan (Abrar Alvi, 1962) are used in the film’s soundtrack. Both films feature story-lines about sex workers.

References Arthurs, J. (2004) Television and Sexuality: Regulation and the Politics of Taste. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Bernstein, E. (2007) Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chapkis, W. (1997) Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor. New York: Routledge. Cowie, E. (2011) Recording Reality, Desiring the Real. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ditmore, M. (2007) In Calcutta, Sex Workers Organize. In Clough, P.T. (ed.) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, pp. 170–186. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Egan, R.D. (2006) Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love: The Relationships Between Exotic Dancers and Their Regulars. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Farley, M. (2006) Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia: What We Must Not Know in Order to Keep the Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly. Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 18, 109–144. Frank, K. (2002) G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gill, R. and Pratt, A. (2008) In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work. Theory, Culture & Society, 25(1), 1–30. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin.



Capturing the Labors of Sex Work

207

Jenness, V. (1990) From Sex as Sin to Sex as Work: COYOTE and the Reorganization of Prostitution as a Social Problem. Social Problems, 37(3), 403–420. Leigh, C. (2004) Unrepentant Whore: The Collected Works of Scarlot Harlot. San Francisco: Last Gasp. Lindquist, J. (2010) Images and Evidence: Human Trafficking, Auditing, and the Production of Illicit Markets in Southeast Asia and Beyond. Public Culture, 22(2), 223–236. Pateman, C. (1999) What’s Wrong with Prostitution? Women’s Studies Quarterly, 27(1/2), 53–64. Rabinowitz, P. (1994) They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary. London: Verso. Rich, B.R. (1983) Anti-Porn: Soft Issue, Hard World. Feminist Review, 13, 56–67. Vance, C. (2010) Thinking Trafficking, Thinking Sex. GLQ, 17(1), 135–143. Vance, C. (2012) Innocence and Experience: Melodramatic Narratives of Sex Trafficking and Their Consequences for Law and Policy. History of the Present, 2(2), 200–218. Weitzer, R. (2000) Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry. New York: Routledge. Williams, L. (1989) Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” Berkeley: University of California Press.

Part IV

Sex

Introduction Sex

Laura Hyun Yi Kang

Deployable as noun, modifier, or verb, the word “sex” encompasses a prolific range of forms, meanings, and practices. While gender has denaturalized sex as a primary morphological distinction between male and female, “sex” still conjures a vivid array of bodies gripped with pleasure, pain, or terror, irrevocably wounded or willfully transformed, provoking disgust or commanding attention, desire, and care. “Sex” also heralds a range of imperatives, instructions, interactions, transactions, and refusals that bind particular bodies to other bodies. In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” Judith Butler clarified the misconception of gender as deliberately chosen artifice or performance imposed upon “sex” as “a simple fact or static condition of a body,” which has the effect of naturalizing a pre-social, extra-discursive materiality of both “sex” and “body” (Butler, 1994: xii). Instead, Butler directed us to examine “sex” as “a regulatory ideal” which is “forcibly materialized through time.” Given that much has been noted about the constructedness and mediating force of all documentaries, it may be useful to approach documentary as itself a technology, with its special purchase on representing reality and real subjects, for varied materializations of “sex” and “bodies that matter.” Indeed, the production and critical reception of a documentary film, Jenny Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990), was central to Butler’s elaboration of the forcible and uneven materializations of “sex.” Documentary representations of “sex” comprise an illimitable archive of studied, furtive, chance, and staged images that circulate in different community, commercial, and institutional contexts: sex education, stag films, ethnographic documentaries, AIDS activist videos, home-made sex tapes. This large catalogue covers the whole range of documentary forms: pedagogical, expository, investigative, pornographic, A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

212

Laura Hyun Yi Kang

activist, autobiographical, souvenir, and experimental. The origins of documentary were centrally bound up with attempts to capture normative and pathological and human bodies for scientific knowledge through the emergent technologies of photographic reproduction and moving images. As Linda Williams has pointed out, male and female bodies were differently filmed in Eadward Muybridge’s early motion studies, Animal Locomotion (1887): “While naked and semi-naked women perform many of these same tasks [as the men], in their activities and gestures we see how the greater sexuality already culturally encoded in the woman’s body feeds into a new cinematic power exerted over her whole physical being” (Williams, 1989: 39). Rather than relay some pre-existing material thereness of sex difference, Williams notes how “what began as the scientific impulse to record the ‘truth’ of the body quickly became a powerful fantasy that drove cinema’s first rudimentary achievements of narrative diegesis and mise-en-scene” (1989: 41). I would extend this insight to suggest that the discursive limits – the powerful investments, necessary disavowals, and naturalized presuppositions – of “sex” have long troubled the categorical boundaries of documentary. Another early instance of the uneven documentary materialization of “sex” can be seen in the VD and “sex hygiene” films produced by the US military and federal government. In the early 1920s, the army funded a 3-hour long series titled “The Science of Life,” which was screened in classrooms for several decades hence. Two films in the series, Personal Hygiene for Young Men and Personal Hygiene for Young Women, aimed to impart medical knowledge about differences in male and female anatomy and physiology, which in turn would facilitate proper management of their bodies and sexual behavior. Martin Pernick has noted substantive disparities between the two films, especially in the coverage of venereal diseases, with the film for boys featuring “more detail about the microbial causes, including technically impressive dark-field microcinematography of treponema” and “more clinical footage, with more graphic close-ups” of infected children (Pernick, 1993: 766). In presuming and anticipating different modes of visual fascination and degrees of sensitivity, the films also entrained disparate practices of looking at “sex.” A third early instance of documenting “sex” can be seen in the documentaries on women’s health produced in the 1970s. In 1974, the San Francisco Women’s Collective produced Self-Health (dirs. Catherine Allan, Judy Erola, Allie Light, and Joan Musante, 1974), which filmed women showing each other how to perform breast and vaginal examinations, including the use of a speculum. This active looking was also highlighted in the documentary Healthcaring: From Our End of the Speculum (dirs. Denise Bostrom and Jane Warrenbrand, 1977). In her 1978 essay, “The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film,” Julia Lesage related this textual detail from Self-Health: “A mixture of voices exclaims and comments on what [the women] see, especially on the veracity and uniqueness of the genitalia. … Women occupy the whole space of the frame as subjects in a collective act of mutual, tangible self-exploration” (1978: 513). In addition to such close-ups and framing, the “political aesthetics” of Self-Health was evident in the women’s

Introduction 213 “amazing spontaneity and lack of self-consciousness about the camera” and, in turn, how the film prodded viewers to “immediately want to talk about two things – sex education and health care” (514). Jane Gaines has pointed to this power to ­provoke and politicize –“the idea of the audience that is collectively moved to get up out of their theater seats and take some kind of group action on behalf of a political cause” – as a significant component of “documentary lore and documentary reality” (1999: 87, 90). Bearing in mind the older but lingering definition of “sex” as a demoted and targeted population, one could point to a large number of documentaries that address instances of misogyny, sex discrimination, and violence against women in a range of social, cultural, and institutional settings. Many of these films both reference particular cases of violation and inequity and showcase specific women’s struggles and concerted actions in pursuit of legal redress and social change. Several documentaries have addressed harrowing instances of systematic sexual violence, from the Japanese military sexual slavery during the Second World War, the rapes of Bosnian Muslim women in “detention camps,” and the mass rapes in the Congo. There have also been several important documentaries on sex work, sex tourism, and sex trafficking. Another important cluster of documentaries that chronicle transgender subjects and female-to-male (FTM) and male-to-female (MTF) transitions, including sex reassignment surgery in some instances, have contributed to a radical rethinking of “sex” and its presumed fixity. The three essays in this section each address both ethical and practical questions that affect documentary practices around three highly charged matrices of materializing the interrelation among sex, gender, and sexuality in distinct cultural and geopolitical contexts. Patricia White’s essay, “Documentary Practice and Transnational Feminist Theory: The Visibility of FGC,” discusses a cluster of documentaries about what is alternately and contentiously labeled as “female genital cutting” (FGC) and “female genital mutilation” in Africa. Rosa-Linda Fregoso’s contribution, “Transforming Terror: Documentary Poetics in Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita Extraviada (2001),” addresses the mass and often brutal killings and disappearances of young Mexican women near the US-Mexico border, which began in 1993, following the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. This “feminicide” demonstrates a complex and vexing imbrication of sex, gender, and sexuality. The killings are violent materializations of the older sense of “sex” as a category of oppressed humanity in their brutal and systematic targeting of female bodies. There is also a sexual component – in the sexual violation of some of the women, in the alleged connection to sex work and sex trafficking, and most importantly, in the Mexican state’s initial blaming of the women themselves for transgressing sexual norms. In addition to the killings, the film also focuses upon the state’s inaction and mishandling of their investigation and their still unsolved status. The third essay in the section by Eve Oishi, “Reading Realness: Paris Is Burning, Wildness, and Queer and Transgender Documentary Practice,” also explores questions around the fraught – desired, compulsory, dreaded, compromised – visibilities of yet a third group of endangered bodies: transgender Latina immigrants, some undocumented, in Los Angeles, California.

214

Laura Hyun Yi Kang

Documentary has served as a powerful vehicle for informing and awakening local and transnational publics to instances of social injustice. The essays all address the role of documentary production and exhibition in shifting local and global frames of community-building, advocacy, and activism. The 1990s and 2000s were dynamic and highly charged times for the activation of queer politics, human rights, and transnational advocacy networks. Both FGC in Africa and the feminicides in Mexico gained significant transnational visibility through their documentary representation. In turn, there were new opportunities for funding, co-productions, exhibition, and distribution of documentary films. For example, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (dir. Lisa F. Jackson, 2007) is credited as inspiring the 2008 UN Resolution 1820 to classify rape as a weapon of war, a world-changing effect which, in turn, becomes a kind of promotional tool for the film but also an instance for affirming the “social change mythos” of documentary more broadly. Holding onto the transformative promise of documentary, the three essays critically engage with the myriad challenges and pitfalls in all of the many stages in which documentaries are made and circulated: conceptualization, production, editing, exhibition, distribution, and critical reception. Each essay insightfully fills out the broader circuits of reception, scholarship, and intertexuality within which certain documentary representations become intelligible and even compelling to specific audiences. White’s essay traces how each of the five documentaries on FGC was produced with variously negotiated terms of cooperation and collaboration with local activists, domestic and international non-governmental organizations, and national broadcast outlets such as the BBC and PBS. White also provides an illuminating history of the important role of Women Make Movies in feminist documentary production and circulation from its beginnings in the early 1970s with The Trials of Alice Crimmins (1970–1971) and Healthcaring (1977). In addition to being included at many international film festivals and human rights and social activist gatherings, Señorita Extraviada has been screened before an impressive array of national governments as well as the European Parliament and the International Criminal Court. All three essays also usefully track changes in documentary production in response to other developments in critical scholarship on documentary and visual representation in diverse fields, including film and media studies, anthropology, feminist studies, lesbian and gay studies, queer studies, post-colonial studies, Latin American studies, and critical race studies. White points to the fraught vector of transnational feminism, specifically the gaps and distance between “academic feminist theories” and the challenging political economy of independent film and media production. Oishi’s essay considers the triangulation among Paris Is Burning, the contentious critical interpretations of that film, and how Wildness is a highly self-conscious response to both the earlier film and critiques, which anticipates and attempts to inoculate the latter film from similar criticisms. In contrast, as a scholar who has written extensively about the feminicides, Fregoso’s essay illustrates the productive insights that are made possible through deep, sustained conversations and collaborations across the realms of media production, scholarship, and activism.

Introduction 215 Another commonality of the three essays is their distinct intertextual framings of the documentaries. In comparatively analyzing five documentaries on FGC that were produced over a decade, White points to textual differences such as the use of voice-over narration and titles, the degree of local and historical contextualization offered, and the relative embodiment or effacement of the filmmaker’s presence among the feminist documentary films on FGC. These differences contest any singular, authoritative representation of FGC but also problematize the logic of grouping any set of films in terms of (1) subject matter; (2) geographical region; (3) identity of the filmmakers and their relationship to (1) and (2). In addition to a comparative discussion of Wildness and Paris Is Burning, Oishi then expands the analytical frame to consider the development of queer documentaries more generally in the intervening two decades. Fregoso considers Señorita Extraviada in the context of Portillo’s large and impressive oeuvre spanning three decades and including experimental and narrative genres. Fregoso’s essay also details the problematic visual representation of the feminicides by news media, other documentaries, and print publications, which Portillo consciously and ethically tried to avoid doing in the film. Both the complexities of the actual phenomenon of the feminicides and their visual misrepresentation/exploitation have produced a unique set of urgencies and challenges to their proper and effective documentary representation, which Fregoso foregrounds in this essay through an extended discussion of the ethics of relaying trauma and traumatic imagery. All three essays also raise interesting questions about the extra-textual documents – such as production notes, catalogue copy, critical reviews, and personal communications – which comprise a broadened archive of authorial intent and thus come to bear upon the interpretation of the documentary text. How are we to make critical sense of such disclosures of a filmmaker’s motivations, investments, and goals? How do they alternately encourage and facilitate certain readings while circumventing and invalidating others? Even in the case of an observational documentary like The Day I Will Never Forget, which adheres to an ethics and praxis of non-intervention, Longinotto’s own position on the controversial subject has been manifest though a published interview: “What we’re seeing in my film is a kind of panicked holding on to this unreal distinction between men and women, a forcing of them into these roles, and at last these young women are saying they’re not happy” (Fowler, 2004: 107). Fregoso’s essay most vividly demonstrates this by incorporating direct ­quotations from several conversations with Portillo over an eight-year span and even including Portillo’s grant proposal for pre-production funding. Oishi’s essay demonstrates how a filmmaker working in the digital era, Wu Tsang, manages the meaning of a documentary through an ever-shifting platform of self-making, r­eflection, justification, and promotion through a blog that he has maintained throughout the production and now exhibition and critical reception of the film Wildness. Such enclosure of encoding/decoding risks a troubling dematerialization, as ethical documentary praxis becomes reduced to a calculated admission of the textual manipulations optimized to produce a film that feels “good” rather than alert its viewers to the uneven and coercive social, political, and economic nodes of materializing “sex.”

216

Laura Hyun Yi Kang

References Butler, J. (1994) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. Fowler, C. (2004) The Day I Will Never Forget: An Interview with Kim Longinotto. Women: A Cultural Review, 15(1), 101–107. Gaines, J.M. (1999) Political Mimesis. In Gaines, J.M. and Renov, M. (eds.) Collecting Visible Evidence, pp. 84–102. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lesage, J. (1978) The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 3(4), 507–523. Pernick, M.S. (1993) U.S. Government Sex Education Films in the 1920s. Isis, 84(4), 766–768. Williams, L. (1989) Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” Berkeley: University of California Press.

10

Documentary Practice and Transnational Feminist Theory The Visibility of FGC Patricia White

Feminist documentary represents women’s agency in its politics of production, address, and reception as well as in its images and issues. Rejecting the status of woman as object enforced by dominant audiovisual codes and discourses of victimhood, feminist documentaries portray female and feminist subjectivity – insisting on voice, choice, and self-representation. Yet transnational feminist political theory has troubled the call to “subjectification,” cautioning that voice and choice are imperatives consistent with neoliberal strategies to manage human desires in a global capitalist framework (Grewal, 2005). The critique of the production of what Inderpal Grewal calls “global feminist subjects” within this process presents challenges to feminist documentary practices engaged with transnational issues of sexuality and women’s rights, in which women are often called upon to tell their stories as a central rhetorical strategy as well as to appear on camera as a kind of “visible evidence” of their situation. The history of neo-colonial Western feminist focus on practices of female genital cutting (referred to hereinafter as FGC)1 in Africa makes the politics of representing this issue particularly fraught. At the same time, FGC remains an intensive focus of grassroots African and transnational feminist activism and cultural production that is important to document. This paper looks at several documentaries on FGC made by or in partnership with UK and US producers, all of them distributed by the New York-based nonprofit media arts organization Women Make Movies (WMM). By tracing changing political and representational strategies in feminist documentaries on the issue and the varying terms on which the films engage their subjects and address their viewers, I aim to put the specificity of independent documentary formats, practices, and institutions in dialogue with feminist theoretical critiques of the wider discourse on A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

218

Patricia White

women’s human rights. The cultural field of documentary – encompassing feminist media organizations like WMM, funders, broadcasters, and educators, as well as scholars, makers, and audiences – constitutes a public sphere in which activist and theoretical debate, contested reception, and continually renewed cultural production articulate the productively shifting terms of transnational feminism.

Women Make Movies As a scholar and teacher of women’s media with a long association with WMM, I am interested not only in questions of representation and feminism but also in how distribution and other networks extend and complicate these questions, multiplying reception contexts across space, culture, and history. As my research has turned to global women’s filmmaking, I’ve tried to uncover the circuits of film and feminism over the past few decades. Founded in 1972, WMM evolved from a New York City production collective to a distributor of media by and about women (with a strong emphasis on documentary) in part to provide a channel of connection and critique crucial to the emerging feminist media movement. The early distribution service grew from requests to rent the WMM production Healthcaring: From Our End of the  Speculum (1976) by Denise Bostrom and Jane Warrenbrand, reflecting the momentum of the women’s self-health movement of that period and the role of media in propelling it (Lesage, 1978). On one level the FGC documentaries discussed in this paper map Women Make Movies’ path from local to global networks. On another, they illustrate an ongoing emphasis on the politics of location. Works on FGC connect with US feminist documentary’s roots in community and health issues, and they focalize questions of power and representation posed by Western feminist approaches to what Trinh T. Minh-ha influentially called “difference: a special third world women issue.” While WMM’s collection is by no means representative of feminist documentary tout court (nor does it comprise documentary exclusively), it provides rich examples of the terrain covered by the term as well as a genealogy of the cultural field. In its role as a non-profit distributor and production assistance organization, WMM serves a US constituency. But the organization’s mission and success give it international visibility. Over four decades, WMM networks have become global, with filmmakers represented in the collection hailing from 38 countries, global activism and diversity reflected in films across the collection, and works exhibited all over the world.2 The organization’s transnational presence shapes the itineraries and reception of individual films and curated programs, as well as the very project of distributing media “by and about women, for everyone,” as a recent promo piece describes it. Currently WMM distributes five documentaries that address FGC in Africa and campaigns to eradicate a practice that affects an estimated 140 million women and girls worldwide.3 FGC is actively challenged by grassroots groups and NGOs and on state, regional, and international policy levels. Advocates cite health risks, including that of maternal mortality, as well as the violation of women’s human rights, including



Documentary Practice and Transnational Feminist Theory

219

that of sexual autonomy. Media about the issue ranges across rhetorical and advocacy positions, from the sensational to the grassroots. As the titles in the WMM collection span 18 years – from Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar’s high-profile Warrior Marks (1993) to Sarabah (Maria Luisa Gambale and Gloria Bremer, 2011), showcasing Senegalese hip hop artist Sister Fa’s “Education without Excision” ­ campaign – they show how feminist documentary strategies have changed with new activist paradigms as well as how they have responded to critiques of both feminist ­neocolonialism and constructions of documentary authority. WMM gives careful consideration to the politics of representation in acquisitions, prioritizing films by African women about African women, yet it has not yet been able to find a strong film on FGC by an African woman filmmaker to add to the collection.4 The five films currently in distribution, made by women in the West or by transnational agencies, often in collaboration with African women, provide multiple perspectives on the issue’s conditions of transnational visibility.

The Politics of FGC Globally, FGC is opposed by the World Health Organization as a violation of the human rights of girls and women. The International Planned Parenthood Federation condemned FGC in its 2008 Declaration on Sexual Rights, which uses a human rights framework.5 Indeed, opposition to FGC is a key plank in women’s human rights campaigns, especially but not only in Africa, and international human rights actors, African states and regional coalitions, and the philanthropic community sponsor multiple initiatives and educational campaigns in Africa and with migrant communities in the West on FGC and what are called harmful traditional practices. FGC has been one of the most spectacular issues in global feminism since it was first targeted by Western feminists in the late 1970s. Women’s International Network founder Fran Hosken coined the term “female genital mutilation” in The Hosken Report: Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females (1979), condemning the practice for its repression of women’s sexuality among other reasons. Many feminist organizers and thinkers in Africa and the West rejected the term “mutilation” as judgmental and critiqued the ethnocentrism and indeed racism of the development discourse for its inadequate attention to social and cultural contexts and its construction of African women as requiring the intervention of first-world feminists. In her classic 1986 essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse,” Chandra Mohanty analyzes work like Hosken’s, showing how Western feminist discourse constructs “‘Third World Women’ as a homogeneous ‘powerless’ group often located as implicit victim of particular socioeconomic systems” (Mohanty, 2003: 23). In discussions of FGC, African patriarchal “tradition” becomes removed from histories of colonialism and women’s cultural agency. The issue of FGC foregrounds imbalances of power and resources between Western and African feminists, and between grassroots and top-down initiatives; it also involves competing discourses on sexuality, violence against women, and rights

220

Patricia White

agendas. As global feminist organizing developed along the model of “women’s rights as human rights,” Grewal explains: “Women” outside the West … were represented as objects of charity and care by the West but could become subjects who could participate in the global economy and become global citizens; this was the “third-world” victim who had become a global subject. (Grewal, 2005: 130)

The transformation of women from object to subject may have been accomplished at the expense of complicity with neoliberal agendas of governmentality, Grewal argues. The way empowerment claims for women in the global South are articulated with neoliberalism is evident in the subtitle of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s best-seller Half the Sky: “turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide,” where opportunity connotes entering a globalized market economy. Kristof and WuDunn call for “a new emancipation movement to empower women and girls around the world,” arguing, in one of their book’s only mentions of the term “feminism,” that “American feminism must become less parochial: every bit as concerned with ending sex slavery in Asia as they [sic] are with Title IX sports programs in Illinois” (2010: 244).6 This rhetorical gesture, which mobilizes American women as agents and standards and invokes legal precedents, is a good illustration of the human rights model that Grewal critiques. Kristof and WuDunn do highlight grassroots initiatives, such as the Senegal-based Tostan’s comprehensive community-led development model, one of the most successful African efforts against FGC (2010: 224–228).7 The PBS documentary based on the book Half the Sky (Maro Chermayeff, 2012) in turn makes use of what Wendy Hesford (2011) calls the “spectacular rhetoric” of the “transnational human rights imaginary” to establish scenarios of recognition that confirm the humanity of the Western liberal viewer. In the segment on maternal mortality, Diane Lane visits Somali physician and politician Edna Adan’s maternity hospital to witness, and reflect for US viewers, the human costs of FGC. Two generalized positions – human rights activism and new forms of philanthropy on the one hand and academic feminist theories informed by Foucault’s critique of liberalism on the other – have become as characteristic of contemporary formations of transnational feminism as they are in tension with each other. The rights-based activist position seeks state redress for crimes against women; the theoretical critique finds these tactics complicit with regulatory regimes. How can documentary studies engage the tension between feminist claims for and about African women subjects and the ideological and ethical assumptions implicit in such claims?

FGC and Documentary Practice Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1996) provide a powerful and influential critique of Alice Walker’s documentary Warrior Marks (1993) and accompanying book, Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women,



Documentary Practice and Transnational Feminist Theory

221

Figure 10.1  Alice Walker with Mary in Gambia, frame grab from Warrior Marks (Pratibha Parmar, 1993).

both produced with filmmaker Pratibha Parmar. Because FGC is such a fraught example of non-Western women’s constitution as universal object-victims, and documentaries deploy images, sounds, and opportunities for identification to bring the issue home, Walker’s film provided a high-profile target of critique. In Grewal and Kaplan’s view, Walker’s film repeats, from a Western multicultural feminist position, the imperialist discourse of a project like Hosken’s. Walker’s on-camera presence and voice-over narration position her – not the African women who are subjected to cutting (the film moves from Senegal, The Gambia, and Burkina Faso to the United States and United Kingdom), or the African feminists working for change – as the dominant voice of the documentary.8 In the film’s opening minutes, Walker reads on camera a letter to Parmar telling the writer’s own story of what she calls a “patriarchal wound”: as a child she was blinded in one eye by a brother’s BB gun. Walker asks Parmar to consider including the letter in the film, concluding: “I have done this in a deliberate effort to stand with the mutilated women, and not beyond them.” The film is thus positioned from the outset as a prominent African-American feminist’s personal journey of identification with the African “other” even as the inclusion of the letter marks a dialogism between the filmmakers as Western feminists of color. Walker and Parmar, Grewal and Kaplan note, “participate in the construction of an identity politics that draws upon both Euro-American cultural and global feminisms to articulate an anti-racist multiculturalism … embedded in the practices of Western modernity” (1996: 6). Yet, Grewal and Kaplan argue, Walker’s personal stake in the issue overrides the film’s integrity as a documentary: “the rhetorical effect of ‘knowledge’ must be produced in the face of a profound lack of information on the part of the filmmakers” (1996: 18). Grewal and Kaplan note that the film’s local “contacts are more

222

Patricia White

haphazard than they are the product of long-term coalitional activity” (18). Ultimately, the film “remystif[ies] genital surgeries in Africa, creating conventional subjects of an anthropological gaze already well-known to Western viewers” (7). Certainly Walker’s presence dominates Warrior Marks. The film circulated widely in North America due to Walker’s reputation and promotional efforts and the publicity garnered by the accompanying book and Walker’s contemporaneous novel Possessing the Secret of Joy, which also deals with FGC. Celebrity human rights advocacy has now become pervasive; the resources of Oprah Winfrey’s media empire throw the limitations of Warrior Marks’s budget – as well as the project’s explicit feminism – into sharp relief. WMM also gives Warrior Marks a more specific independent feminist media context, contextualizing it, for example, among other films by Pratibha Parmar, many of which center on LGBTQ people of color.9 Produced in 1993 as African spokeswomen like Adan and Sudanese surgeon Nadia Toubia were making a culturally specific perspective on FGC the center of international campaigns,10 the film can be positioned in a history of contestation regarding not only the practice of FGC but also its representation, and Grewal and Kaplan’s critique of the film’s enunciation and address is itself crucial in this positioning. During the years since Warrior Marks, international women’s human rights law and policy initiatives have intensified, given visibility by Hillary Clinton’s watershed speech on the topic at the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 and her later work as Secretary of State.11 WMM’s more recent acquisitions on FGC make much more explicit use of the women’s human rights paradigm and foreground African characters and collaborators. In contrast to Warrior Marks’s multicultural politics of identification and intervention, Kim Longinotto’s The Day I Will Never Forget (2002) is an observational film that closely follows Fardhosa Ali Mohammed (identified only as Fardhosa onscreen), a midwife and healthcare advocate working among the Somali population in Kenya. The film is the first African-set film by Kim Longinotto, an award-winning British filmmaker known previously for her documentaries on women in Japan and Iran. Longinotto currently has 16 films in distribution in the United States with WMM (including several more recent films produced in Africa, as well as in India and the United Kingdom), more than any other filmmaker, identifying her work very closely with the organization, in both the educational market and in festival and television programming networks.12 The Day I Will Never Forget depicts the issue of genital cutting as Fardhosa confronts it in her daily practice delivering babies or removing stitches to permit newlyweds to have sex. Issues of health and sexuality emerge in the course of her interactions as do changes in community circumstances and attitudes. The film includes footage of community meetings, interviews with current and ex-circumcisers, and a frank discussion about sexual pleasure and tradition among women with different points of view on circumcision. The most harrowing sequence is an on-camera circumcision of two sisters. Before the procedure begins, the father instructs the circumciser to give the girls “just a little cut,” to avoid stitching “like in the old days” (referring to the practice of infibulation, the most extreme form of



Documentary Practice and Transnational Feminist Theory

223

cutting). “This is in the hands of the government now … Everybody has ‘rights’ now,” he tells her. The first girl is cut and begins to scream while her little sister looks on. When her turn comes, the younger girl begins to cry and sob, “I don’t want it” – the girls are especially afraid of getting an injection. Yet the circumciser and another women pin the girl down, and filming continues as the procedure is completed. When asked about the possibility of interceding, Longinotto replies that she had agreed in advance not to do so. Fardhosa had persuaded the family to use the less intrusive method, and she did not want the fragile trust she had built up with the  community affected by the actions of the visiting filmmakers (White, 2006: 128 n. 8; Tay, 2009: 79). Afterwards, the sisters are interviewed and say they are glad to have gone through with the procedure.13 Belinda Smaill (2009) argues that Longinotto’s scenes of “painful modernity” “initiate an ethical acknowledgement of the other in her specificity.” This ethical acknowledgement extends to the film’s address to the viewer. “The coevalness of the subjects achieved in terms of film form and practice generates a historical consciousness specific to documentary” (2009: 65–66). Yet Longinotto’s commitment to observational style lets the images and sounds speak for themselves, leaving the viewer without information on, for example, the reasons for the Somali refugee population’s presence in Kenya. Fardhosa’s work is remarkable, but wider grassroots efforts to end FGC shown in the film are not contextualized.

Figure 10.2  Two sisters followed through and interviewed after the cutting ritual in The Day I Will Never Forget (Kim Longinotto, 2002). Courtesy of Women Make Movies.

224

Patricia White

Such efforts are the topic of WMM’s most high-profile work on the topic since Warrior Marks, Africa Rising: The Grassroots Movement to End Female Genital Mutilation (2009), produced by the advocacy organization Equality Now.14 A comprehensive and authoritative film focusing on African solutions for combating FGC, Africa Rising addresses a broad audience. Not unlike Warrior Marks, the film visits multiple African countries (Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali, Somalia, Tanzania), but it profiles local experts and Equality Now’s partner organizations in each location. Of more restricted scope are two additional documentaries, Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter (Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater, 2009), about the asylum case of a Philadelphia woman from Mali, and Sarabah, the profile of Sister Fa. All three films depict intersections of public and private stories of FGC in a transnational context, highlighting recent legal and cultural initiatives. All of these recent documentaries avoid the methodological universalisms critiqued by Mohanty, emphasizing located testimonies and women’s agency. The primary on-camera subjects include village women and activists and healthcare professionals based in Africa with long histories as local organizers, officials, or service providers, reversing dependent “women in development” and aid models and working against the construction of “the African woman.” In Africa Rising, Kenyan activist Agnes Paveyio of Tasaru Girls Rescue Centre in Kenya and Kadidia Sidibe of AMSOPT (Association Malienne pour le Suivi et l’Orientation des Pratiques Traditionnelles) in Mali are among the activists profiled; Tostan is featured in Sarabah. The works present “global subjects” of rights as local subjects; the on-camera interviewees are filmed in their workplaces and they speak to their own contexts and experiences even as their stories and images are circulated to international audiences. Yet African “tradition” is often still implicitly contrasted with Western “modernity,” even as the films make transnational connectivities more visible. In Sarabah, Sister Fa’s story is mapped onto a liberal narrative imbedded in processes of globalization; a successful musician who lives with her German husband and child in Europe, Sister Fa returns to confront village practices as a celebrity diasporan subject.15 Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter focuses on Mrs. Goundo’s fight for asylum in the United States. Her claim is that her daughter will be cut if they return to Mali, where, unlike in neighboring West African nations, the practice is not yet outlawed. The film opens with the title “Philadelphia,” establishing Mrs. Goundo’s situation in the United States and the city’s migrant Bambara community; a cut to the title “Mali” introduces a segment in which village women prepare for a cutting ritual. Shots of unnamed young girls looking into the camera enact the trope of the voiceless victim. The cut between these segments marks the fact that Mrs. Goundo lacks the freedom of movement the white documentarians have to travel to Africa in the service of her story. Africa Rising documents policy, legal, health, community, and educational approaches in five African nations and lists additional partners in the credits (as well as such celebrity supporters as Meryl Streep, Gloria Steinem, and Eve Ensler). All of the on-camera activists are Africans; nearly all of the profiled experts are women, and



Documentary Practice and Transnational Feminist Theory

225

Figure 10.3  Young girls anticipating the cutting ritual in Mali, frame grab from Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter (Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater, 2009).

the producers are Africa Prize laureate Faiza Jama Mohammed, director of Kenya’s branch of Equality Now; African-American lawyer Taina Bien-Aimé, former executive director of the New York office;16 and Equality Now co-founder Jessica Neuwirth. Paula Heredia, the director hired by Equality Now, is an Emmy-winning editor and active feminist filmmaker.17 The film includes numerous interviews with girls, women, and men who have been convinced by educational efforts to oppose the practice, including a group of former circumcisers who have been supported in establishing new income-generating activities. Aimed at consciousness- and fundraising, Africa Rising takes a positive view of prospects for the movement to end what the organization and the documentary choose to refer to as FGM.18 The range of groups profiled gives a sense of how much work has been done on the ground. As the film “travels” across Africa, transitional graphics represent a map of the continent, highlighting the names of the countries visited. Grewal and Kaplan critique a similar use of the map as a neocolonial trope in Warrior Marks. Here, I argue that the transitions work as a graphic of governmentality, tracing the progress of NGO- administered rights-based activism across the continent. National, regional, and local solutions vary, though there is room in the overview format for specific contrasts to be drawn. Burkina Faso is singled out as a progressive case, for example, with the country’s first lady, Chantal Compoare, appearing briefly in the documentary. Somalia, visually distinguished by women’s and girls’ stringent Islamic dress, provides a contrasting view; although the political situation is not elaborated, the practice is presented as an intractable problem. To my mind a richly comparative, in fact transnational, African story is muted in the film’s balanced structure and general address. Cutting among five activists in five countries without the opportunity to set up their political, cultural, and historical contexts, the film risks a “composite” effect.

226

Patricia White

Figure 10.4  Mary Solio in Narok, Kenya. Publicity image from Africa Rising (Paula Heredia, 2010). Courtesy of Equality Now and Women Make Movies.

Nevertheless, Africa Rising addresses the problem of the ethnographic gaze by ensuring that African women speak for themselves as subjects – as subjects of work and organizing, as subjects of pain and of sexual pleasure. The initial first-person, subtitled English narration in the film belongs to a 14-year-old girl who, after the fade-out from the titles, is identified as Mary Solio, resident of a Kenyan home for girls who have fled circumcision. A sign painted on the building reads V-Day safe house, but the relationship with Eve Ensler’s V-Day Foundation is not made explicit. The film is squarely framed by the discourse of women’s rights as human rights, visible in the individual narratives, the emphasis on legal remedies, and the specific organizations profiled. The presentation of women’s and girls’ right to bodily dignity, to self-determination, to education (the grounds on which many young women refuse early marriage, with which cutting is associated), links with the larger work of Equality Now as an advocacy organization. The issue of sexual autonomy is subordinated to health claims in many educational efforts around FGC in part because they are directed at girls.19 In The Day I Will Never Forget and Africa Rising, young girls who have successfully challenged those who would perform the procedure – usually their parents – in the courts appear on camera as exemplary rights-bearing subjects. These girls are old enough to run away to seek services and legal advocacy; Africa Rising contrasts their case with the situation of girls too young to do so. Africa Rising presents two cautionary tales. The film is dedicated to Tatu Chilingo, a 14-year-old Tanzanian described as an anti-FGM activist, who died after the



Documentary Practice and Transnational Feminist Theory

227

procedure was forcibly performed on her; the case is introduced in the opening moments of the film, later documented in chilling 2003 footage of her body and burial, and then revisited in present-day interviews with the father who was arrested after her death and the coroner who examined her. The images of Tatu’s body are haunting; she becomes the mute counterpart to the empowered girls who speak on camera. In the transition to the film’s conclusion we meet 15-year-old Fanta Camara from Mali, whose urethra was permanently damaged when she was cut at age five. With help from Equality Now, and the support of her mother and other local women, Fanta travels to Paris with activist Kadidia Sidibe to seek medical care. We witness her visit to a state-of-the-art healthcare facility and watch her walk the streets of Paris. Titles inform us that an operation was not possible because the follow-up care would not be available in Mali, but assure us that Fanta has been helped by antibiotics. Moreover, we are told, “The trip to Paris transformed Fanta into a confident young woman.” Images of Fanta’s face are accompanied by a song: “Exciser c’est mutiler; arrêtez de mutiler.” The term “mutilation” aligns the song with the rhetoric of 1970s global feminist activism around the issue, but the film’s implicit appeal for support for local facilities and organizations is consistent with the present moment of women’s human rights partnerships. Perhaps nowhere is the production of a global subject more notable than in this brief scene of travel to the Western metropole, in which the “mutilated” girl becomes whole, a subject of modernity, and is sent back home to organize. Fanta is held up on her return as an inspiration to girls, mothers, and activists in Mali and, in turn, to viewers of the film to work to support the efforts documented in the film. While Warrior Marks cuts back and forth among African activists and experts and protestors in the United States and United Kingdom, a mark of its unsettled message, Africa Rising remains in Africa until this last scene, when it seems to make a bridge to its predominantly non-African audiences. If these independent feminist documentaries themselves are unlikely to be shown in the villages, it is also the case that they probably wouldn’t be entirely effective in such contexts: Sister Fa’s music and the targeted educational campaigns depicted in the films themselves are examples of alternative feminist media practices. Ultimately, these documentaries show the discourse of “universal rights” through contingent and connected stories. The political and economic causes of gendered violence, the histories in which these personal stories are embedded, the frames through which they are received, are not and perhaps cannot be rendered fully visible by the films. But in their plurality of modes and forms of address, the documentaries challenge universality in feminist subjects.

Conclusion The FGC documentaries in the WMM collection represent differences in documentary modes – The Day I Will Never Forget is “observational,” while the others are largely “interactive,” to use Bill Nichols’s (1991) influential terms – and in the way they are

228

Patricia White

made – by NGOs in collaboration with grassroots groups (Africa Rising), commissioned for television (The Day I Will Never Forget), made by independent producers with public television support (Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter, Sarabah). The more recent films tend to efface the authorial voice so prominent in Warrior Marks, constructing African women’s contemporary reality as central to the documentary voice, with Africa Rising using on-camera commentary/voice-over by transnational activist Efua Dorkenoo (currently Equality Now’s London office advocacy director on FGM).20 Despite significant differences in scope, scale, and filmmakers’ background and commitments, the fact that all of these films are distributed by WMM establishes certain parameters, as well as a dialogic space of address. Documentaries on FGC are  contextualized in relation to other films on the topic and by other films in the ­collection – Longinotto’s body of work; films that engage transnational feminist theory such as those of Ursula Biemann or Trinh T. Minh-ha; films on activism around ­women’s human rights like Calling the Ghosts: A Story about Rape, War, and Women (Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelincec, 1996), The Price of Sex (Mimi Chakarova, 2011), Saving Face (Daniel Junge and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, 2011), and Señorita Extraviada, Missing Young Woman (Lourdes Portillo, 2001). Among films on Africa Laura F. Jackson’s The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (2007), is an excellent example of the tactical use of documentary in women’s human rights struggles, as it has been identified as a catalyst to the passage of the 2008 UN Security Council resolution declaring rape a tactic of war.21 Yet the film has drawn criticism akin to that directed at Warrior Marks for the filmmaker’s making a link between her own experience of rape and that of her subjects. Rape in the Congo is thus also teachable as a catalyst for discussion about documentary rhetoric and transnational feminist solidarity. WMM’s American audiences may be preselected for their readiness to attend to a range of feminist issues and interpretations as well as to independent (non-corporate) filmmaking modes. Yet as I’ve noted, while the revenue base for the organization is US colleges and universities (as well as media arts and community groups, television and theatrical outlets), much of WMM’s global profile comes from special exhibitions in which works in the distribution collection travel (one significant international venue in the history of the organization was the UN conference on women in Nairobi in 1985) and from the organization’s visibility at international documentary festivals and other venues. Thus WMM participates in the circulation of US feminisms (including multicultural, queer, and trans politics) and theoretical and audiovisual discourses on women’s human rights to other parts of the world. This essay attempts to trace dimensions of authorship, authority, style, and rhetoric in a diverse set of films on one particularly fraught issue. The subject matter of FGC – at once sensational and an inspiring example of successful feminist activism across and beyond the borders of Africa – signals both the urgency and the difficulties of the feminist praxis of documentary filmmaking. How and to what extent do different forms of women’s (independent) media participate in the “transnational production of global feminist subjects”? That is, how do these films, like the NGOs they sometimes are produced or commissioned by, make feminist claims and identities legible by casting women and girls as objects of



Documentary Practice and Transnational Feminist Theory

229

compassion within models of human rights? Do the visual and narrative rhetorics and politics of address of different forms of media – grassroots documentary, advocacy video, and feature films – perform this subjectification differently? How can attention to the “regime of truth” of human rights discourse help us think about questions of ethics and aesthetics in feminist documentary? Feminist documentary scholars need to attend with nuance to these issues, while respecting the labor and vision of independent artists and the institutional and discursive networks in which their work is shaped and encountered.

Notes 1 The terminology used to designate this range of practices carries political weight. While the term female genital mutilation or FGM has the longest history in the international realm, it is deemed judgmental by many working to eradicate the practice. African activists often use the customary terms female circumcision or excision (in the Francophone context); the US Agency of International Development uses the transitional format FGM/C on some websites and FGC in recent position papers. Legal scholar Isabelle Gunning (1991–1992) uses the term “female genital surgeries” to draw attention to parallels with cosmetic modifications common in the West. Gunning is followed in this usage by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1996), discussed in more detail below. Summarizing the debates, Elizabeth Heger Boyle notes, “I choose to use the term female genital cutting because Asma Abdel Halim at the [USAID] specifically requested that I use that term and because it is an accurate, non-politicized description of the practice” (2005: 25). I adopt this term in this essay for similar reasons. 2 Forty-three percent of the makers represented in WMM’s collection are from outside the United States (email communication with WMM distribution department, June 11, 2012). On WMM’s work with international women’s organizations, see Zimmerman and White (2013). 3 World Health Organization Fact Sheet 241, updated February 2014, http://www.who.int/ mediacentre/factsheets/fs241/en/, accessed July 25, 2014. According to WHO, “Female genital mutilation (FGM) comprises all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.” Many African states have enacted laws banning FGC (and several more are within reach) and the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol), which includes strong language against FGC, came into effect in 2005. 4 Grassroots educational campaigns in Africa tend to use media like music and theater rather than film. Women With Open Eyes (Femmes aux yeux ouverts, 1994), by AnneLaure Folly from Togo, documents a campaign against genital cutting in Burkina Faso among stories on other issues African women are organizing around. Anne-Laure Folly describes the reception of her film on French TV: “I was told that the women in my film were not really African women because they were modern. I made the film, Femmes aux yeux ouverts, here in Burkina Faso, about women, all illiterate, who fought against excision. … They did not think that these women, or people anywhere in the world who submit to exploitation, are conscious of their exploitation. The people who are exploited are not stupid” (Ellerson and Folly, 1997). WMM distributes Ellerson’s film Sisters of the Screen: African Women in the Cinema (2002).

230

5 6

7

8

9 10 11

12 13

14 15

Patricia White Women With Open Eyes profiles grassroots work in Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, and Benin and is distributed in the United States by California Newsreel, an independent distributor known for its African collection. Folly’s filmography includes another film on FGC, Déposez les lames (1999), which is not to my knowledge in distribution in the United States. Somali-born Soraya Mire’s documentary about her own experience of FGC, Fire Eyes (1994), is distributed by the educational distributor Filmmakers Library. The most celebrated African film on the topic is Ousmane Sembene’s feature-length narrative film Moolaadé (2004). Sexual Rights: An IPPF Declaration, p. 17, http://ippf.org/resources/publications/­ sexual-rights-ippf-declaration/, accessed July 25, 2014. They go on, in the same “plank” of the platform: “Likewise, Americans of faith should try as hard to save the lives of American women as the lives of unborn fetuses” (2010: 254), implying that feminism is ideologically parallel to religious conviction and distancing their envisioned movement from histories of struggle against gender ­ oppression. Founded in Senegal by American Molly Melching, Tostan has used its successful model in a number of African countries. “Tostan’s mission is to empower African communities to bring about sustainable development and positive social transformation based on respect for human rights,” http://www.tostan.org/, accessed July 25, 2014. Bill Nichols writes: “By ‘voice’ I mean … that which conveys to us a sense of a text’s social point of view, of how it is speaking to us and how it is organizing the materials it is presenting to us. In this sense ‘voice’ is not restricted to any one code or feature such as dialogue or spoken commentary” (1983: 18). Parmar has recently completed the feature-length documentary, Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth (2013). WMM served as fiscal sponsor in the United States. Toubia is one among several African diasporan founders of the international organization Rainbo (Research Action and Information Network for the Bodily Integrity of Women). Although Clinton continued her advocacy for women’s rights during her term as Secretary of State, the United States remains one of seven nations (including Iran and Sudan) who have not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979 and signed by President Carter in 1980. See White (2006). Longinotto’s works have won prizes at high-profile festivals like Sundance and IDFA, bringing prominence to WMM as well. In contrast, see the on-camera depiction of a young, unnamed girl’s circumcision in Films for the Humanities and Sciences’ “educational” documentary Female Circumcision: Human Rites (1998), which is meant to position the viewer as enlightened and judgmental, but mainly marks him/her as Western and voyeuristic. In Half the Sky, we watch Diane Lane’s reactions as she watches footage of a procedure that is kept off-camera. Equality Now has offices in New York, London, and Nairobi, and works through grassroots activism and legal advocacy on four main areas affecting the human rights of women and girls, of which FGM is one. More mainstream examples of African diasporan women speaking out on the practice based on their own experience include Somali-Dutch author and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Somali-Austrian supermodel/humanitarian Waris Dirie, author of the autobiographical Desert Flower (1998).



Documentary Practice and Transnational Feminist Theory

231

16 Taina Bien-Aimé served on the WMM board during my tenure. 17 Born in El Salvador, Heredia is a New York-based independent editor and producer whose credits include an Emmy for HBO’s In Memoriam, New York City 9/11/01. She is active in New York Women in Film and Television. 18 Screenings of the film raise awareness for the Fund for Grassroots Activism to End Genital Mutilation, which currently has partners in nineteen African nations. 19 See Rangan (2011) and Hesford (2011: 151–187) on children’s role in the visual culture of human rights visual discourse. 20 Originally from Ghana, Dorkenoo is a founder of the advocacy organization FORWARD in the United Kingdom, where she is an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. 21 http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c709.shtml, accessed July 25, 2014.

References Boyle, Elizabeth Heger (2005) Female Genital Cutting: Cultural Conflict in the Global Community. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ellerson, Beti and Folly, Anne-Laure (1997) Interview by Beti Ellerson and Press Conference. 15th FESPACO, February, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, http://www.africanwomenincinema. org/AFWC/Folly.html, accessed July 25, 2014. Translated from French and published in Ellerson, Beti (2000) Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film Video and Television. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Grewal, Inderpal (2005) Women’s Rights as Human Rights: The Transnational Production of Global Feminist Subjects. In Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, pp. 122–157. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grewal, Inderpal and Kaplan, Caren (1996) Warrior Marks: Global Womanism’s NeoColonial Discourse in a Multicultural Context. Camera Obscura, 13(3), 4–33. Gunning, Isabelle (1991–1992) Arrogant Perception, World-Travelling and Multicultural Feminism: The Case of Female Genital Surgeries. Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 23, 189–248. Hesford, Wendy (2011) Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hosken, Fran (1979) The Hosken Report: Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females, 2nd edn. Lexington, MA: Women’s International Network News. Kristof, Nicholas D. and WuDunn, Sheryl (2010) Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. New York: Random House Digital. Lesage, Julia (1978) The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film. Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 3(4), 507–523. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003) Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nichols, Bill (1983) The Voice of Documentary. Film Quarterly, 36(3), 17–30. Nichols, Bill (1991) Documentary Modes of Representation. In Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, pp. 32–75. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rangan, Pooja (2011) Immaterial Child Labor: Media Advocacy, Autoethnography, and the Case of Born into Brothels. Camera Obscura, 25(3), 143–177.

232

Patricia White

Smaill, Belinda (2009) The Documentaries of Kim Longinotto: Women, Change, and Painful Modernity. Camera Obscura, 24(2), 43–75. Tay, Sharon Lin (2009) Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Walker, Alice and Parmar, Pratibha (1993) Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. White, Patricia (2006) Cinema Solidarity: The Documentary Practice of Kim Longinotto. Cinema Journal, 46(1), 120–128. Zimmerman, Debra and White, Patricia (2013) Looking Back and Forward: A Conversation Between Debra Zimmerman and Patricia White. Camera Obscura, 28(1), 150–151.

11

Transforming Terror

Documentary Poetics in Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita Extraviada (2001) Rosa-Linda Fregoso

“The art of film can be used in the service of the unprotected,” Lourdes Portillo once wrote in an article on Señorita Extraviada. “And documentary can take a stance and inform, activate, promote understanding and compassion” (Portillo, 2003: 234). Her highly acclaimed documentary, Señorita Extraviada is compelled by a poetic politics and ethics aimed at transforming terror. Señorita Extraviada is one of the first documentaries to investigate what was once considered Mexico’s number one human rights issue: the murder and disappearance of hundreds of women and girls in the violence-torn border city of Ciudad Juárez. What is now understood as various forms of “feminicide” started in 1993, a year after the signing of NAFTA, and has continued on through the tenure of four Mexican presidents. As the numbers grew, the state continued to turn a blind eye to the violence afflicting women. Shortly after the release of Señorita Extraviada, La Red Ciudadana contra la Violencia (Citizen’s Network against Violence) noted that the number of murdered women had increased to 269, with an additional 450 disappeared. (Between 1985 and 1992, by contrast, 37 women were murdered in Ciudad Juárez.) Roughly one third of the women were murdered under violent circumstances: they were held in captivity and subjected to extreme forms of sexual violence, rape, torture, strangulation, hanging, and burning; their bodies discarded in remote, sparsely populated areas around the city. Initially media accounts framed these cases of feminicide as the “mass sex murder case,” embellishing the stereotype of a lone serial killer or multiple serial killers/ sexual predators. To contest the media’s sensationalism, in an earlier publication, I characterized feminicide as a “case of gender extermination.” Later, Cynthia Bejarano and I1 elaborated an analytics of feminicide as gender-based violence partly to A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

234

Rosa-Linda Fregoso

disrupt the conflation of “gender” with “biological sex” in the category of “woman” as much as to circumvent the sexualization of women which stems from narrow definitions of gender-based atrocities as exclusively sexual in nature – as figured by the category of “sexual violence” – while ignoring other structural forms of violence targeting female bodies. Our analytics of feminicide does not mean that feminicide is disconnected from “sex,” “sexuality” or the “sexualized dimension of violence” (Fregoso and Bejarano, 2010). Julia Monárrez’s study of feminicide in Ciudad Juárez alludes to the “transformation of women’s bodies into a sexual fetish that can be tortured, mutilated, raped, and thrown away” (Monárrez Fragoso, 2010: 68, my emphasis). For Monárrez, murdering and discarding women in “sexually transgressive settings: desert zones, empty lots, steam beds, sewers and garbage dumps … symbolize the women’s low human value as less than human: as sexually fetishized commodities” (2010: 60). Too often however the emphasis on “sex,” and the “sexualized dimension of violence” recycles a colonialist figuration of “border as brothel” (Castillo and Tabuenca Córdoba, 2002: 216). Few of the women murdered were sex workers, yet in order to devalue their lives, state authorities alleged that the victims transgressed sexual norms, leading a double life: maquila work by day; sex work by night. With Señorita Extraviada, Portillo counters the dehumanizing logics of state discourse and colonialist narratives that paint the border and its inhabitants as signs of chaos, illegality, excessive violence, sex, and sexual promiscuity. In portraying the cases of feminicide, Portillo strives to contribute to the transformation of the very conditions that gave rise to the inhumane acts in the first place. The documentary’s poetic politics encourages an understanding and compassion for the victims and survivors of human rights violations which can potentially generate relations of solidarity and political action. “Our task is to communicate heart to heart, to join our forces that will put an end to violence and brutality perpetuated on those without voice,” she stressed (Portillo, 2003: 234). Although its true impact in the world may be difficult to gauge, Señorita Extraviada is above all driven by a desire to change the hearts and minds of its viewers. In the years following its release, Portillo became a crusader for women’s human rights, screening the film before international audiences and raising awareness about the persistence of feminicidal violence in Mexico. As Portillo explains in the essay she published shortly after the release of the documentary: “I traveled endlessly, to Italy, Greece, Norway, Canada, Spain and other countries to get the word out, and to gather signatures and letters to both President Fox and President Bush. I have spoken to influential journalists in many countries, who have taken it upon themselves to carry the banner for justice in Juárez. No foundations were willing to support this human rights crusade, so I refinanced my house in order to take a year off to do this work” (Portillo, 2003: 234). Señorita Extraviada has screened before members of state and intergovernmental bodies like the European Parliament, the United States Congress, and the International Criminal Court, and at human rights conferences and forums like the 9th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in Paris. At major international and national film



Transforming Terror

235

festivals, the documentary has garnered over 20 awards2 and Portillo has toured with the documentary beyond the festival circuit, screening Señorita Extraviada before organizing and activist groups in Latin America, the United States, and Europe. This public visibility and recognition has given Portillo a platform for bearing witness to human rights injustices on the border and denouncing the Mexican government for its complicity in terrorizing women. Señorita Extraviada informs its viewers about the issue of feminicidal violence in Ciudad Juárez, but it goes beyond the informative level. It incites the imagination and inspires creative participation in social action. Early on Portillo chose to frame the documentary’s narrative in ways that explicitly echoed the organizing strategies of the mothers and other women’s rights activists whose social justice campaign intensified around the time of Señorita Extraviada’s release, which coincided with the assassination of human rights lawyer, Digna Ochoa in 2001, and the unearthing of the tortured bodies of eight women in “el campo algodonero” (the cotton field) adjacent to the Maquiladora Association’s headquarters in Ciudad Juárez. The documentary makes no pretense to “objectivity” but rather explicitly assumes the perspective of the mothers/activists in their demands for justice. In an early interview, Portillo discusses the social impact and role of the documentary in activist politics: So that was really the whole intention of the film … To create a kind of consciousness, to incite people to act, and it did that. I think every time that the film showed someplace people were outraged, which they should be. Everywhere I went people wanted to know “What can I do?” So it was at that moment that I said “yes, I need to figure out what they can do.” And I need to have addresses and I need to have people for them to connect with and things to do. Everywhere I went it was always the same, you know? People wanted to do something, everywhere. There was never a screening where people didn’t stand up and say I’m going to write a letter to the Mexican consulate. It was amazing. I remember in Quito Ecuador I showed the film and an old man who’s about eighty stood up and he said, “Well I’m outraged and I think this is a verguenza, this is shameful for the Mexican government and today I’m going to write a letter when I get home to the Mexican ambassador. And who in this audience,” he asked about two hundred people, “is going to write a letter like mine?” And they all raised their hands. It was so touching, so beautiful that people felt that kind of compassion for the girls and were willing to do something. (Portillo, unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2003)

This astounding effect of moving an audience to action is the highest mark of achievement for a political documentarian like Portillo, or for that matter for any political arts movement like Latin America’s “Tercer Cine/Third Cinema.”3 Portillo has consistently embraced an aesthetics of social justice illustrated by such documentaries as Black God, White Devil (dir. Glauber Rocha, 1964); The Hour of the Furnaces (dir. Solanas and Getino, 1968); The Battle of Chile (dir. Patricio Guzman,00201975, 1976, and 1979), whose “common denominator” as one of its exponents, Argentinean filmmaker Fernando Birri explains, is a “poetics of transformation … a creative energy which through cinema aims to modify the reality upon which it is projected” (Birri, 1997: 96).

236

Rosa-Linda Fregoso

Figure 11.1  Lourdes Portillo. Courtesy of Lourdes Portillo.

This essay highlights the power of Señorita Extraviada to incite the ­imagination and inspire creative participation in social action. In a series of conversations that span a decade, Portillo and I discussed the making of the documentary and the role of the artist in the politics of social justice and human rights. We explore the discursive and aesthetic strategies behind a poetics of transformation, the responsibility of the artist and the intellectual in bearing witness to state ­terrorism and on behalf of people suffering persecution and human rights ­violations. Our conversations date to the period she first decided to make a ­documentary about the murders and disappearances of women in 1998, the year we both began our research into the subject of feminicide on the border, and which in my case culminates in two co-edited collections and numerous essays on feminicide.4 In presenting this reading of the film, and discussion with Portillo, I too make no pretense to “objectivity” nor do I assume the stance of the disinterested/distanced spectator. Not only would it be disingenuous for me to occupy or claim this position but it is also an impossibility. I know things about the process, history, and making of this documentary due in large measure to my close friendship with its maker. My intimacy, ongoing conversations, and interviews with Portillo for over 10 years have given me a unique perspective on the film but so too has my own ongoing research on the subject, close contact with mothers/activists in Mexico, as well as my political commitment to and solidarity with the movement to end feminicide. I occupy the position of an interested and intimate spectator and this vantage point colors and I



Transforming Terror

237

daresay improves my reading of Señorita Extraviada. Yet, divulging my position as an interested/intimate spectator is not meant to invalidate other possible readings of the film, for mine is simply one specific and historically situated reading of the many possible analyses of the film.

Possessed by the Subject Matter Portillo first heard about the murders of women and girls in Ciudad Juárez from our mutual friend, filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña, who referred to an article written by Debbie Nathan for The Nation.5 As Portillo recalls: Renee said “Look at this, I can’t believe what’s happening in Mexico.” I couldn’t believe that all these murders went unnoticed; almost a hundred girls had been killed at that point. And Renee said to me “Don’t do this project. I know that it’s very tempting for you to do, but you shouldn’t do it. It’s pretty scary.” So when Renee said that it was kind of scary, I thought to myself, “Oh this is something that I’d like to do.” (Villaseñor, 2003)

Portillo’s family is from the border state of Chihuahua and the “harrowing panorama of what might be taking place” (Portillo, unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2011) in the border region is something that captivated and ensnared her. The notion of “being possessed by an idea” is one that Portillo has used in another context to describe how a story takes hold of her imagination: “My world was shaken to its core, and the fear experienced by the people of Juárez became part of my own daily life for the next three years” (Portillo, 2003: 233). By the time Portillo first started filming, women’s rights groups had d ­ ocumented the cases of 162 murdered women between 1993 and 1999, and hundreds more disappearances. Until then, Ciudad Juárez had Mexico’s highest rate of sexually violent crimes. Apart from media sensationalism about serial killers/sexual predators exterminating young women, speculation about the motives behind the killings was just as macabre: some alleged that women were murdered or disappeared by sex traffickers; others by an underground economy of pornography and snuff-films; by a satanic cult; by criminal gangs for their bonding rituals; and even by unemployed men envious of women maquiladora workers. But no one knows for sure. In her funding proposal to the Soros Foundation Portillo mentions the “ghoulish theories that the women were victims of a crime ring that smuggles human organs into the United States for transplant surgery.” Behind all this loud sensationalism, Portillo discovered “a deafening wall of silence: most people were too terrorized to speak out. The authorities, when questioned, gave only cavalier and confused responses” (Portillo, 2003: 229). It was “the silences, the elusiveness, the lies, the misrepresentation, the misinformation,” the lack of an evidentiary basis for a conclusive story that gave Portillo the impetus for making a different type of film.

238

Rosa-Linda Fregoso

The Art of Witness Portillo opens the documentary by declaring, “I came to Juárez to track down ghosts and to listen to the mysteries that surround them.” What she discovered in the border city was the unseen presences, the unspoken violence, the unrepresentability of terror. She was so haunted by what she witnessed in the course of tracking down ghosts, so horrified by the sexualized nature of the violence and the enormity of the disappearances, by the indifference, subterfuge, and impunity surrounding gender crimes, by so much grief, fear, and despair, that she invested Señorita Extraviada with her outrage. “After realizing that I couldn’t get to the bottom of it, it became a different thing. It became a human rights cause,” she confided to María Cristina Villaseñor (Villaseñor, 2003). “Now I’m not investigating. I am witnessing and denouncing something that is unacceptable to human beings” (Portillo, unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2002). In referring to this dual purpose, witnessing and denouncing, Portillo signals the complex discursive construction of the documentary. She couldn’t get to the bottom of things, couldn’t produce conclusive evidence about the gender crimes, nor of the identity of the perpetrators and their motives for murdering and disappearing so many women and girls. The film’s ending is inconclusive and open-ended not just by the force of Portillo’s own volition but because feminicide was then (and continues to be) an ongoing phenomenon; its perpetrators and motivations difficult to pin down with categorical certainty: It’s a never-ending story that you could go on and on with … So you have to finish when you know you have no money. Then the question becomes, how do you make it important, and how do you make a film that doesn’t neatly tie up into an ending. I mean that was the real challenge. And I think a lot of people that are not used to this kind of storytelling, are a little bit put off by the story. You know, “You didn’t solve it.” … This is a documentary in which you cannot tie the end into a neat bow. (Portillo, unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2002)

Unable to tie the end into a neat bow, Portillo was freed from the documentary burden of veracity. Questions of truth and referentiality became less central to Señorita Extraviada’s discursive construction than, say, questions of “documentary poetics.”6 “Witnessing” and “denouncing” as Portillo suggests, are key components of its poetics, but the witnessing dynamics inscribed in Señorita Extraviada is less about supplying evidentiary proof of the event or the legal act of proving, than it is about the art of witnessing. In Señorita Extraviada testifying to the truth of an occurrence involves the recognition of both the literal plight of border women who have been murdered and disappeared and the general (symbolic) consequence of feminicide for the social world in which we live. To explain the documentary’s allegorical figuration, Portillo has cited the observations of colleagues like performance artist Guillermo GómezPeña, who once said “Señorita Extraviada is a metaphor for what is happening in



Transforming Terror

239

the world today,” and Mexican filmmaker María Novaro, who upon seeing the documentary at its premier in San Antonio, Texas recognized its literal and symbolic truth, “Esta película es una bomba” (“This movie is a bomb”), then insisted that it be screened in Mexico because Señorita Extraviada spoke to the truth of the government’s complicity: its failure to intervene and act on behalf of its citizens (Portillo, unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2004).7 In this sense, the documentary bears witness to a truth beyond the occurrence of feminicide – “something which, by definition goes beyond the personal, in having general (non-personal) validity and consequences.” As many of us who study feminicide in Latin America maintain, the state’s failure to exercise due diligence – to investigate, prosecute, and ultimately stop the k­ illings – in effect perpetuates the historic structure of impunity, a hallmark of authoritarian regimes throughout the region. Señorita Extraviada does not “bring proof ” as Derrida writes about the act of testifying, but rather “promises to say or to manifest something to another … a truth, a sense which has been or is in some way present to [her] as a unique and irreplaceable witness” (Derrida, 2000: 194). What is this truth or sense that has been present to her? In the first place, there is the truth of suffering, fear and horror that exceeds the limits of didactic documentaries, as I will discuss shortly. Then there is the truth of what impunity represents. As manifested in Señorita Extraviada, the truth or sense which has been revealed to and by Portillo are cases of Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer – bare life – who can be killed with impunity since in the eyes of the Mexican state, their lives no longer count. As Portillo adds, “A poor brown woman in Mexico doesn’t have a lot of value. They are worthless. They are sex objects. When you kill one woman, then there are 20 to replace her” (unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2004). The sense of Derrida’s notion of sacramentum or oath gestures the truth that conjoins the witness and the addressee: “The same oath links the witness and his addressee,” he writes, “but this is only an example – in the sense of justice: ‘I swear to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.’ This oath (sacramentum) is sacred: it marks acceptance of the sacred, acquiescence to entering into a holy or sacred space of the relationship to the other” (Derrida, 2000: 194). Portillo testifies to this reality. In accepting this oath, she commits herself and the narrative to others, and in so doing forges “intersubjective relations that ground the act of bearing witness” (Guerin and Hallas, 2007: 12) in human connections: between survivor/witness (addresser) and filmmaker (witness/addressee); between filmmaker (addresser) and audience (secondary witness/addressee), between survivor and audience. This form of witnessing differs from and even goes against the grain of the “disengaged, guilt-ridden viewing of atrocity-as-spectacle that many forms of spectatorship take” (Cubilié, 2005: 11). In contextualizing the historic structure of impunity, violence, and trauma, Señorita Extraviada makes a call to us in the present, to be present in the space of the “figurative witness,” as witness to the witness of the atrocity of feminicide. Portillo’s form of bearing witness “opens to another poetic and semantic space” (Derrida, 2000: 188).

240

Rosa-Linda Fregoso

This alternative poetic and semantic space involves a third way of testifying, “not in the sense of ‘in favor’ or ‘in the place of,’” as Derrida explains, “but ‘for’ someone in the sense of ‘before’ someone. One would then testify for someone who becomes the addressee of the testimony, someone to whose ears or eyes one is testifying” (2000: 199). Kelly Oliver calls this third way of testifying “an ethical-political sense of witnessing.” As she explains: “This sense of witnessing not only involves testifying to the events, observed historical facts, but also to the meaning of those events, which goes beyond what the eyes can see” (2007: 161). Portillo is keenly aware of the film’s power to act and interpret a reality “which goes beyond what the eyes can see” as well as what the ears can hear. And she recognizes the ethical-political responsibility entailed in testifying before someone about the meaning of those events. As she expressed it to me, “I think the truth for me is in the experience, in the purity of the experience. That’s where it resides. If we’re to understand each other as human beings you know we have to look at each other in the most truthful kind of way and that has to do with our happiness and with our suffering, and with our feelings, todo lo afectivo” (unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2004). Bearing witness in film is an image-based process but here Portillo’s form of witnessing “opens to another poetic and semantic space”: lo afectivo, the affective, the unseen presence, beyond what the eyes can see. From the beginning of the film, Portillo insists on this other form of bearing ­witness – “I came to Juárez to track down ghosts” – a witnessing which demands our engagement and communion with the truth she re-presents for us. The willful

Figure 11.2  A rastreo (“combing the desert”). Family members searching for their missing daughters. Courtesy of Lourdes Portillo.



Transforming Terror

241

infliction of harm and injury devastated an entire community, as she so compassionately puts it: The suffering, the amount of suffering that people have gone through and which I did not capture in its totality. Because the suffering that the mothers suffered or the husbands or Maria for example who was kidnapped when she came back to Juárez. Yes, I’d like to go back to document the suffering of the children, the girls, the families, and how it’s destroyed family after family. The destruction. It’s not just five hundred girls that have been murdered. It’s thousands of people whose soul has been wounded. (unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2004)

Touching Visuality Señorita Extraviada makes a radical intervention into the rhetorics of the documentary. In her long accomplished career,8 Portillo has demonstrated a mastery over documentary form by both embracing and rejecting the conventions of documentary realism, and utilizing its realist aesthetics in provocative and playfully self-conscious ways. Even as she deploys well-established techniques for communicating documentary truth – interviews, actuality footage, and voice-over narration – she often interrogates the criteria for truth and accuracy in documentary, its reliance on visual evidence, and directs our vision to the plurality of truths and the constructedness of the image. In her earliest documentaries, the use of voice-over leaned toward the poetic and speculative, often relying on a wide array of multisensory images to conjure an experience beyond the visual and informative realms. Portillo’s style is innovative in its embrace of “irreverence” as a technique for transcending the literal, explanatory mode for apprehending and interpreting reality. Some of her signature techniques involve playing with the narrative’s linear forward-moving temporality as well as the summoning of “disqualified”9 sources of knowledge passed on in the form of legends, gossip, canciones rancheras, corridos, myth, and proverbial wisdom.10 Señorita Extraviada continues and expands Portillo’s distinctive documentary praxis. This time however Portillo eschews irreverence and playfulness for a more solemn tone, basing the factual (explanatory) parts of the narrative on journalistic sources (newspaper reports and television news), yet moving beyond the numbers and statistics. Portillo explains this desire for a “new kind of experimental approach”: I realized early on that there was no way that the footage that had been shot by other people could be used in this new approach. In discussing all this with Vivian, my editor, we realized that this film was just not lending itself to that kind of playfulness because it was so serious and so tragic … You couldn’t go back and forth and play with time when things were accumulating, deaths were accumulating; the numbers were increasing. (Unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2003).

242

Rosa-Linda Fregoso

The film demonstrates a unique stance toward evidence, one that sits less in the realm of factual or empirical truth, and more in the domain of the truth of emotions. Here Portillo infuses explanatory documentary discourse with a poetic layer, an alternative and evocative mode of framing truth, which has even sparked criticism about Señorita Extraviada’s “truth discourse.” When the documentary was first shown in Ciudad Juárez, local authorities publicly denounced the testimony of Maria, one of Portillo’s main witnesses, as a fabrication. Then, a congresswoman in Chihuahua’s Chamber of Deputies accused Portillo of “amarillismo” (“yellow journalism”) for allegedly perpetuating “urban legends” which attributed the murders and disappearances to the collusion of the government and the narco-trafficking industry. In the design of Señorita Extraviada, Portillo envisioned a “documentary approach with visual metaphors, impressionistic B-roll footage, and exegetic sound-track to enhance the film’s coherence and force.”11 She gleaned a number of visual techniques from previous documentaries. Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, as Portillo explains, integrated black and white footage excerpted from an experimental film to provide a stylized representation of torture. Similar techniques are utilized for visualizing the corporal consequences of trauma, such as the use of canted framing and elliptical editing to render a stylized representation in the scene of Maria’s testimonial, as survivor-witness account of the torture of women. Also from Las Madres, Portillo draws on photographs of the murdered and disappeared children; from The Devil Never Sleeps, she appropriates the inconclusive ending of a murder-mystery; from Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena, Las Madres, and The Devil, she takes the requiem style of storytelling. Making a film about an unfolding traumatic event raises the concern about the ethics of trauma imagery both from the perspective of viewing subjects and that of the imaged subjects. The experience of personal loss for family members had been (and continues to be) such a life-altering trauma that Portillo considered a more reverential approach to the subject matter, as a way of dealing with the ethics of the image, in her words: “Lurid pictures of the girls’ dismembered bodies were published and added to the brutality of their murders. Their deaths remained no more than statistics for the press for many years. But the increasing number of murders without recourse to justice was devastating to the communities.”12 Susan Sontag (1977) hints at the fine line between trauma photography and traumatic photography, a photograph that traumatizes its spectator. But she also suggests something else. Photographed images of atrocity, horror, and abjection demand an ethically responsible viewing, at the same time as the viewing process itself, through repetition, familiarity, and ubiquity of the images, can inure us, produce numbness in the viewer (“something went dead”), as much as they can traumatize us (“something is still crying”). Documentary photography (and film) of atrocities inadvertently spawn indirect/ancillary (secondary) trauma on viewing subjects – from the shock at witnessing the suffering of others – and tertiary trauma – from our inability to intervene.



Transforming Terror

243

In the course of making Señorita Extraviada, Portillo and I talked at length about this dreadful paradox of trauma photography/film. We revisited time and time again our skepticism about images that simultaneously demand an ethically responsible viewing and corrupt the viewing process through repetition and familiarity. In our image-saturated world of YouTube and social media, the abundance (and circulation) of images of violence – what Sontag calls “image-glut” – may portend an era of social insouciance. For others, visual portrayals of human suffering are vital to the forging of a politics of solidarity and intervening into the wider political and cultural arena. “The tortured bodies of the victims were necessary,” Diana Taylor writes about images of atrocity in Argentina. “They made a difference in that they made difference visible” (2003: 157). Images, in this sense, participate in the transformation of the social world. Yet Sontag’s reflection on the paradox of photographs that can both traumatize and anesthetize the viewer raises another concern regarding trauma photography: the exploitation of subjects. In an earlier critique of the work of journalist Charles Bowden I voiced my skepticism about Bowden’s decision to publish an enormously disturbing photograph of the tortured body of a young girl which even newspapers in Mexico (notorious for publishing pornographic images of sexualized violence)13 refused to publish because the image was so terrifying. As Bowden confesses, “the lips of the girl pull back, revealing her white teeth. Sounds pour forth from her mouth. She is screaming and screaming and screaming.”14 From my perspective, whatever Bowden’s intentions, his decision to publish the image did

Figure 11.3  A cross installation in memory of the missing women and girls. Courtesy of Lourdes Portillo.

244

Rosa-Linda Fregoso

nothing other than multiply the abjection and victimization of this murdered young woman. Visualizing the violent procedures of torture and human suffering in cases like Bowden’s is a form of trauma pornography that compounds the exploitation and victimization of the victims of feminicide on the borderland. Making visible the violent procedures of disappearance and torture that authoritarian states refuse to recognize may indeed “make a difference” insofar as it serves to rally the international human rights community, but imaging tortured bodies also undermines the full humanity of the deceased and the survivors of atrocities. The ancillary (secondary) trauma affecting viewers of atrocity is even more severe and tangible for the relatives and friends of the deceased and disappeared who must live daily with their personal loss and the repeated experience of compounded trauma from each new announcement, media report, or image of a murdered and disappeared woman. Portillo abstained from visualizing images of mutilated female bodies that had been lasciviously photographed and published,15 because she did not want to exploit the suffering of the relatives, add to their trauma, nor amplify the victimization of the murdered and disappeared women. This refusal to show the tortured bodies of the deceased opened up a space for an alternative to image-based proof, an aesthetics grounded in embodied sensory knowledge about the impact of dehumanizing violence that did not sacrifice the veracity of the experience. “We aimed for feeling, for something evocative, something that touches you,” Portillo told me. “People wanted to feel the presence of the girls and not just hear numbers and see bodies” (unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2007). This evocation, as opposed to imaging, of the presence of the victims, led to the design of a distinctive aesthetics, a “touching visuality.”16 The quest for an alternative to the vision-centered sensory experience of film has been an enduring musing for feminist film and video-makers. In the early 1970s, feminist avant-garde filmmakers, Barbara Hammer and Carole Schneeman, first explored the sense of touch in the visual field. Hammer’s film, Dyketactics (1974) probes the erotics of the female body by appealing to a more tactile kind of vision, a style she called “experiential cinema.” This emphasis on film as an embodied practice of “touching” over the modernist “privileging of sight” is crucial to a feminist aesthetics for as Hammer posits (riffing on John Berger’s “The child looks and recognizes before it can speak”), “children know the world through touching before they can ever see.”17 As an embodied practice, experiential films aim to move beyond the modernist segmentation of the senses and appeal to a full range of sensory experiences that capture what Laura Marks calls “the unrepresentable senses such as touch, smell and taste” (2000: xvi). For Marks, haptic visuality refers to films and videos that conjure a fuller range of sensory impressions, beyond optical viewing alone. Intercultural cinema qualifies as haptic because it “calls upon the memories of the senses in order to represent the experiences of people living in the diaspora” (2000: 168). Portillo’s touching visuality involves the careful design of multisensory mixes in the form of touching imagery that enhances the viewer’s contemplation, vulnerability, and bodily relationship to the image. In developing this touching visuality, Portillo aimed



Transforming Terror

245

to represent the unrepresentable experiences of deep sorrow and grief in ways that invite the viewer to feel vulnerable, intimately connected to, and present in the corporal experience of a mother’s (and one father’s) mourning and feelings of loss (see below). That was my intention for the film, for the viewer to feel rather than to intellectualize and try to figure out what’s happening. We wanted it to be an experiential film. I wanted viewers to feel what it’s like to be in Juárez; to feel what it’s like to lose a beautiful young girl. (Unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2007).

The film mourns the loss of countless young women and girls and conveys the experience of grief through the mothers’ testimonials. The viewer’s sensory impressions are further enhanced by a series of lyrical images accompanied by the soundtrack of solemn Gregorian chants. First is the recurring close-up image of a flowing dress shot in slow motion as a pair of mature female hands arranges it carefully on a bed. The scene is shot in slow motion, with low-key lighting and warm tones serving to conjure the erotics of a mother’s love. Throughout the film, a repetitive stream of photographs of young women and girls with the dates of their disappearance/murder listed underneath, reappears. The movement of the camera across each photo still, to the tempo of reverential music, makes it seem as though our eyes are touching the film. The composition, repetition, and sensory enhancement of these two different types of scenes, followed by a dissolve to a black screen, invites viewers to contemplate the images on screen. They evoke deep feelings of sorrow and appeal to our sentiments and vulnerability. This, after all, is Portillo’s intention, “for the viewer to feel rather than to intellectualize,” to make ourselves vulnerable to the image, to abandon our ocular mastery for (an)other bodily relationship between the ourselves (the viewers) and the image.18 Portillo developed this touching visuality by working closely with her production team, planning the narrative structure and techniques that would stimulate other sensory impressions. During a retrospective of her work in Madrid in 1999,

Figure 11.4  Parents mourning the murder of their daughter. Courtesy of Lourdes Portillo.

246

Rosa-Linda Fregoso

Portillo and I visited the Museo del Prado’s exhibition of Goya’s dark paintings, which later inspired the documentary’s somber tone, as she explains: I thought these paintings are just astounding. And I showed Kyle [the cinematographer] the book of Goya paintings I had purchased and said “Look, these are the paintings. I want them to inspire us.” One of the things about those Goya paintings is the sky, that sense of doom, the sense of gloom, darkness and mystery, it’s what we used for the skies in the film. You see the sky go from light to dark and these clouds passing, well they are inspired by those Goya paintings. (Unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2002)

As Portillo explains in another context, “What the documentary does is to give you a sense of fear and claustrophobia. It starts closing in on you” (Villaseñor, 2003). If Portillo had retained this ominous tone as the film’s sole register, to convey the darkness of the “vortex of Juárez,” as she calls it, then viewers would have more likely felt shattered and disheartened, “irrevocably grieved and wounded,” as Sontag felt on seeing her first photographs of atrocity. To mitigate these feelings of distress and offset the sense of fear and claustrophobia inspired by Goya’s dark paintings, Portillo resorts to counterpoint, incorporating into the film’s narrative structure aesthetic techniques drawn from what I have elsewhere called “the discourse of religiosity.”19 Portillo employs religious symbolism and iconography subversively. The strategic placement of images of crosses, montages of crucifixion and home altars, the crescendo musical score of Gregorian chants, including the solemn chant for the dead, establish a meditative, hieratic rhythm in the film. Lourdes describes Señorita Extraviada as a “Requiem.” She has in effect re-signified the “Requiem” into an artistic composition for the dead, and transformed the solemnity of the chant for the dead into a form of healing, as a palliative effect for the soul. Viewers may be subjected to the dark emotions of fear, despair, gloom, and grief, but at the same time, the film refuses to leave us with an unbearable heartache, with feelings of helplessness and distress. A central component of Portillo’s touching visuality, the emotional charge that aesthetic religiosity conjures, stems from her own deep feelings for the subjects in her film: It is a very intense emotional connection between the subject and myself, one that goes beyond words. I really have no words for it. You can call it “compassion,” you can call it “connection,” you can call it “understanding.” There are many words that you can use, it’s not even about thinking. Suddenly that moment of intense emotional connection is just happening … Time just stands still and sometimes things are just very intense and very deep, and it’s an emotional connection, an understanding that happens between two people. Like the vortex that you mentioned, time does stand still. (Unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2003)

Portillo translated the energy, emotional intensity and connection, the time standing still into narrative form, to arrest the film’s forward-moving temporality and communicate her emotional investment with the subjects of the film. One further example of this translation is found in the placement of photographs of deceased and disappeared young women and girls.20 The insertion of the photographs between interviews, narration, and news stories is a deliberate and calculated



Transforming Terror

247

Figure 11.5  Poster for the documentary Señorita Extraviada. Courtesy of Lourdes Portillo.

use of photo stills to arrest the narrative’s forward momentum and mark the rhythmic pace of the documentary. As noted above, the combination of photo stills with hieratic music, camera movement, and montage makes it seem as though we are touching the images. The photographs in this sense are not just about evidence or bringing proof as in the expository documentary. They are elements in a subjective documentary, marking Portillo’s compassion, deep connection, emotional closeness to the women and girls. In this sense, the photographs are hagiological because they honor the women’s existence and in the process serve to quell viewers who may potentially feel traumatized by the horrific drama unfolding.21 In mobilizing this hagiographic effect, the photographs embody the dialectics of still life, a visual rendering of the death (absence) and life (presence) of her subjects. The dialectical tension between negation of life in the present tense of feminicidal violence (violation inscribed on the female body) and the affirmation of life in the past tense (repetitive images of radiant women and girls), punctuates the entire documentary. For Portillo there is more to this violence and suffering. There is also the future tense of redemption. Although the photographs appear to conjure victimhood (deceased and disappeared women), they simultaneously reclaim subjecthood (the vitality and sensuality of female existence). The photographs capture moments of happiness in the women’s lives and as such, the dialectical tension between the imaging of victimhood and subjecthood reaffirms female subjectivity more so than v­ ictimization/abjection. Were it not for the opening and closing scenes, it might have been the other way around. As Sergio de la Mora (2004) writes about the opening and closing sequences, the ephemeral superimposed shots of young women in the act of witnessing the events unfolding convey women as social actors, “looking at the world as subjects rather than as objects of the gaze.” In opening and closing the film with these poetic,

248

Rosa-Linda Fregoso

ethereal images of women’s agency and subjectivity, Portillo redeems and rescues life from its nullifying death force.

The Ethics of Documentary Poetics In our conversations about the effects of her touching visuality, this penetrating movement into the affective realm of truth, Portillo confides: We’re channeling people’s feelings and we’re capturing them in this great machinery … We are invoking their suffering and we’re portraying it and disseminating it in the art we create. I’m being honest with you. It’s our way of disseminating the truth of suffering in a way that will activate people after they see the film. That they will feel a sense of goodness from doing something. (Unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2003). In many ways, this ethical insistence for us to stand as witnesses to the dead and ­survivors seems very akin to the Latin American tradition of testimonios; it aims to compel the viewer to action. As in Alicia Partnoy’s The Little School, that Cubilié writes about, “Distanced spectatorship is not allowed to remain the ‘unmarked’ default ­position, but is marked as the position that refuses the full humanity of the dead and the survivors of atrocity” (Cubilié, 2005: 187).

Even as trauma and violence in Portillo’s film exist outside the frame, Señorita Extraviada troubles the space of distanced spectatorship. Portillo’s demand is similar to Judith Butler’s call for “modes of public seeing and hearing that might well respond to the cry of the human within the sphere of appearance” (Butler, 2006: 44–45). The film insists on our hearing and recognizing the “cry of the human,” on our recognizing the humanity of “women who are being sacrificed,” because as Portillo laments, “they are viewed as worthless women. They’re poor, they’re brown, everything that is worthless in Mexico, they personify” (unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2002). In recognizing the humanity in the “cry of the human,” Portillo reappears the disappeared and murdered women from the profoundly hidden space generated by the state’s denial and erasure of feminicide. Señorita Extraviada recognizes violence as both a witness against life itself and against a particular kind of identity: poor, racialized women. Channeling people’s feelings and disseminating the truth of suffering in a way that will activate people after they see the film reflects the longstanding aspirations of the new Latin American cinema, a poetics of transformation that “generates a creative energy which through cinema aims to modify the reality upon which it is projected” (Birri, 1997: 96). This poetics of transformation calls for the overthrow of systems of domination rooted in and permissive of violence, slavery, conquest, genocide, and feminicide. Portillo shares this understanding that images participate in the ­transformation of the social world: If you are going to talk about human rights, you can’t be didactic, you have to be compassionate, you have to be humane and you have to be emotional. You have to be all the things that make a person act on behalf of another person. How can you protect



Transforming Terror

249

a child or denounce violence against women? With your heart. You may be saying “here are the human rights violations” yet it’s all words. But if you show it and you see it and you feel it, then you become a part of it and it becomes a part of you. Yes, we become part of it and it becomes part of us. We enter into “the sacred space of the relationship to the other.”

Notes 1 Throughout the years, I have worked with Mexican-based organizations such as Voces sin Eco, Amigos de las Mujeres de Juárez (co-founded by my co-author, Cynthia Bejarano), Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa, Familias Fortalecidas Exigiendo Justicia, Fundación María Sagrario, and the Red por la Vida y la Libertad de las Mujeres. 2 The awards include the “Special Jury Prize” at Sundance Film Festival; Amnesty International’s first ever “Award for an Artist;” the “Nestor Almendros Award” from Human Rights Watch; “First Prize ‘Coral’ for Best Documentary” at the Havana Film Festival; and the “FIPRESCI Award” at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival. 3 Tercer Cinema is also known as “The new Latin American Cinema Movement.” 4 See Fregoso and Bejarano (2010, 2011); Fregoso (2000, 2003b, 2006). 5 Originally, the documentary’s working title, “Death Comes to the Maquilas,” was taken from the title of Nathan’s article in The Nation, January 1997. 6 See Michael Renov (1993). 7 On July 19, 2002, the documentary was screened in a public plaza, el Jardín Hidalgo in Coyoacán (Mexico City), followed by a panel with notable Mexican intellectuals including the late Carlos Monsivaís, Elena Poniatowska, and María Novaro. 8 Portillo’s films and videos include: Al Más Allá (2008, 43 minutes, experimental documentary); My McQueen (2004, 20 minutes, experimental documentary); Culture Clash: Mission Magic Mystery Tour (2001, theater performance); Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena (1999, 47 minutes, feature-length documentary); Conversations With Intellectuals About Selena (1999, 57 minutes, documentary); This Is Your Day (Hoy es tu Dia) (1998, video installation); Sometimes My Feet Go Numb (1994, 2 minutes, performance video); The Devil Never Sleeps (El Diablo Nunca Duerme) (1994, 82 minutes, documentary); Mirrors of the Heart (1993, 60 minutes, documentary); Columbus on Trial (1992, 18 minutes, performance video); Vida (1989, 10 minutes, short narrative); La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead (1988, 50 minutes, documentary); Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (1986, 64 minutes, documentary); After the Earthquake / Despues del Terremoto (1979, 27 minutes, short narrative). 9 My use of the term “discredited” is indebted to Michel Foucault (1980). 10 See Fregoso (1999) for further discussion of these techniques, as they apply to The Devil Never Sleeps. 11 “Death Comes to the Maquilas: A Border Story.” A proposal to the Soros Documentary Fund for a pre-production grant of $25,000 (on file with the author). 12 See Portillo (2003) and her unpublished interview with Fregoso, 2007. 13 See Sergio de la Mora (2004) for further discussion of Mexican popular culture’s obsession with the pornography of sexualized violence or what he terms the “spectacle of the gendered practices of sexualized violence.” 14 See my complete analysis of Bowden’s abjection of the murdered women of Juárez in Fregoso (2003b: chap. 1).

250

Rosa-Linda Fregoso

15 See Portillo (2003). 16 Writing in another context about the production of presence, I consider the language of the ephemeral as a way to animate the unseen but felt presences, the memories of las desaparecidas. Señorita Extraviada is part of a new politics of the body taking shape around poetic, ethereal representations that animate an alternative sense of presence or what Hetherington (2003) calls a praesentia, the manifestation of “an absence” within the “material presence of social life.” Originally concerned with the manifestation of the holy dead (saintly relics) in “insignificant fragment of ordinary material” or saintly relics, praesentia is “concerned with performance and presence … with the experience of mingling: distance and proximity; presence and absence; secular and divine; human and non-human; subject and object; time and space; vision and touch.” In “making those discursive categories appear uncertain and blurred,” it brings to the surface the unseen but felt presence, the memories of the subject no longer living, the socially haunting forces. Praesentia points to the centrality of alternative cosmologies for understanding and imagining subjectivity, and in particular the subject of human rights. See Fregoso (2006). For a compelling analysis of the allegorical elements in Señorita Extraviada, see Amy Sara Carroll (2006). 17 See Fregoso (2003a). 18 Paraphrasing Marks (2000: 164). 19 See Fregoso (2003b: chap. 1). 20 Writing in another context I note that Señorita Extraviada is an example of the inscription of normative gender identities. The exclusive focus on the murder and disappearance of “young women” has had a similar effect of normalizing traditional gender identities, in this case, by coding the murdered women as “virgins.” As I have argued elsewhere, the film’s emphasis on the purity and innocence of the victims is strategic, designed to counter the state and the media’s campaign of “blaming of the victim” by attributing female non-normative sexuality as the cause for their murders and disappearances. Yet in the title of the film, señorita is problematic from a feminist perspective for its failure to unsettle traditional meanings about women’s sexuality, especially the assumptions regarding the patriarchal regulation of women’s sexual behavior implicit in the word. The Spanish use of the term señorita refers to several things. It translates into “young woman” (Missing Young Woman); an “unmarried woman” (in contrast to a señora); and most telling it refers to a woman’s virginity (“es señorita”), derived from Catholic prohibitions on premarital sex and patriarchal valorization of the “purity” (read “virginity”) of a woman. The documentary privileges the young and innocent victims at the expense of the other, older (less pure) victims of feminicide (i.e., single or divorced mothers, sex workers, etc.), which can in turn leave viewers with the impression that violence against women is somehow more egregious if the victim is young and innocent. See Fregoso (2006). 21 Theresa Delgadillo characterizes the film as a form of “spiritual mestizaje,” and Portillo’s identification as “mother” with the mothers of the murdered and disappeared women (2011: 128–136).

References Birri, F. (1997) For Nationalist, Realist, Critical and Popular Cinema. In Martin, M.T. (ed.) New Latin American Cinema, vol. 1, Theory, Practices, and Transnational Articulations, pp. 95–98. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Butler, J. (2006) Precious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso.



Transforming Terror

251

Carroll, A.S. (2006) “Accidental Allegories” Meet “The Performative Documentary”: Boystown, Señorita Extraviada, and the Border-Brothel → Maquiladora Paradigm. Signs, 31(2), 357–396. Castillo, D.A. and Tabuenca Córdoba, M.S. (2002) Border Women: Writing from La Frontera. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cubilié, A. (2005) Women Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human Right. New York: Fordham University Press. Delgadillo, T. (2011) Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. de la Mora, S. (2004) Terrorismo de género en la frontera de EUA-México. Cinémas d’Amérique Latine, 12, 116–132. Derrida, J. (2000) A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text: Poetics and the Politics of Witnessing. In  Clark, M.P. (ed.) Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today, pp. 180–207. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, M. (1980) Introduction. In Herculine Barbin: Being Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. R. McDougall. New York: Pantheon Press. Fregoso, R.L. (1999) Sacando los Trapos al Sol (airing dirty laundry) in Lourdes Portillo’s Melodocumystery, The Devil Never Sleeps. In Robin, D. and Jaffe, I. (eds.) Redirecting the Gaze: Gender, Theory, and Cinema in the Third World, pp. 307–329. New York: State University of New York Press. Fregoso, R.L. (2000) Voices Without Echo: The Global Gendered Apartheid. Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media and Composite Cultures, 10(1), 137–155. Fregoso, R.L. (2003a) California Filming: Reimagining the Nation. In Fuller, D.B. and Salvioni, D. (eds.) Art/Women/California 1950–2000: Parallels and Intersections, pp. 257–274. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fregoso, R.L. (2003b) meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fregoso, R.L. (2006) “We Want Them Alive!”: The Politics and Culture of Human Rights. Social Identities, 12(2), 109–138. Fregoso, R.L. and Bejarano, C. (eds.) (2010) Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fregoso, R.L. and Bejarano, C. (eds.) (2011) Feminicidio en América Latina. Mexico City: UNAM. Guerin, F. and Hallas, R. (2007) Introduction. In Guerin and Hallas (eds.) The Image and the Witness. London: Wallflower Press. Hetherington, K. (2003) Spatial Textures: Place, Touch and Praesentia. Environment and Planning A, 35(11), 1933–1944. Marks, L.U. (2000) The Skin of the Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Monárrez Fragoso, J.E. (2010) The Victims of Ciudad Juárez: Sexually Fetishized Commodities. In Fregoso, R.L. and Bejarano, C. (eds.) Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas, pp. 59–69. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Oliver, K. (2007) Women as Weapons of War. New York: Columbia University Press. Portillo, L. (2003) Filming Señorita Extraviada. Aztlán, 28(2), 229–234. Renov, M. (1993) Towards a Poetics of Documentary. In Renov (ed.) Theorizing Documentary, pp. 12–36. New York: Routledge. Sontag, S. (1977) On Photography. London: Penguin Books. Taylor, D. (2003) Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s Dirty War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Villaseñor, M.C. (2003) An Interview with Lourdes Portillo. Risk/Riesgo, 2(3).

12

Reading Realness

Paris Is Burning, Wildness, and Queer and Transgender Documentary Practice Eve Oishi

In 1991, Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, positioning it squarely at the center of a movement that B. Ruby Rich first named the “New Queer Cinema,” an emerging group of independent films marked by a diversity and range of styles and subject matter but connected by a “common style.” “Call it ‘Homo Pomo’ ” Rich wrote in an ­influential 1992 article. “[T]here are traces in all of them of appropriation and pastiche, irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind” (Rich, 2004: 16). In the intervening years, Paris Is Burning has become one of the most well-known and influential documentaries on queer and transgender people of color for its commercial success1 and its role in introducing and popularizing black and Latino drag ball culture and vernacular to a mainstream audience, as well as for critiques leveled at the film from scholars and activists who were troubled by what they saw as an exploitative and unrealistic depiction of a vulnerable population.2 As I discuss later in this essay, the director Jennie Livingston sustained criticism for her decision to remain an invisible, off-camera presence in the film, a strategy that, together with the already fraught politics of a film about lowincome gay and trans people of color made by an economically privileged white lesbian, linked the film in some critics’ eyes with earlier ethnographic films whose exoticizing gaze reproduced the unequal power relations they often sought to expose. The film’s introduction of black and Latino New York ball culture and the complex performances, competitions, and judging rituals around various categories of “realness,” to a broader audience also situated the film as a key text to be mined by queer studies scholars to develop theories about representation, performance, realness, and reality. A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



Reading Realness

253

Just over 20 years later, the 2012 documentary Wildness by Wu Tsang also takes as one of its central subjects transgender people of color, in this case, Latina transwomen who patronize and perform in the Los Angeles bar, The Silver Platter. Made by a transgender person of color – but one who is distinct from his subjects in several ways including incommensurate linguistic, legal, socioeconomic, gendered, and educational status – the film is shaped by Tsang’s consciousness of the critical discourse about its cinematic precursors, in particular Paris Is Burning. Tsang has made reference to his awareness of the parallels between the two films,3 and several of Tsang’s other projects are organized around a direct critique of Livingston’s film.4 In his catalogue essay for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, for which Wildness was selected, Tsang articulates his understanding of the loaded political terrain into which he was stepping in making the film. In deciding to make a film about my experiences there, I was torn between my desire to “give voice” to an underrepresented movement (critical trans resistance) and the problems of representation itself – the burden of speaking on behalf of experiences that were not entirely my own. (Tsang, 2012b: 262)

One of the ways that Tsang addresses this central dilemma is to make himself a highly visible and central presence in the documentary. The documentary is titled not after the bar but after the weekly party and performance event that Tsang, a young bi-racial Chinese-American transgender artist, and his collaborators threw for two years at the Silver Platter. The party brought a foreign element, namely an ethnically mixed, largely queer avant-garde art scene, to a bar that was usually frequented by gay and transgender immigrants from Mexico and Central America. The film details the rise and fall of the immensely popular Tuesday night party that included charges of gentrification, fears that the party’s press coverage would endanger the often undocumented bar regulars, and the death of one of the bar’s owners that initiated a legal battle over his will in which Tsang became involved. As Tsang describes in his blog that chronicles the making of the film, the film was originally envisioned as a more ethnographic picture of the Silver Platter’s trans Latino community that the director came to know through his weekly party. As such, he imagined that he was making a “trans resistance film.” But eventually he had to come to terms with the limits of his own understanding and knowledge of the community and with the politics motivating his own desires (and those of the attendees of Wildness) for and about the Silver Platter community.5 However, as Tsang himself acknowledges, foregrounding and thematizing the filmmaker’s position and desires does not release him from the dilemmas inherent in the project of making a documentary about an “other.” Looking at these two films, which take such different approaches to a similar problem, allows us to see two entwined problematics: the ways in which the challenges faced by each film are emblematic of the larger historical context in which they were made, specifically notions of queer community and its subjects; and the ways in which the negotiation of these challenges occurs in relation to a broader field of ethical and

254

Eve Oishi

formal questions relating to documentary itself. Looking at the specific crises of ­representation embodied by both the films (and, in the case of Paris Is Burning, the critical discourse about the film) can help us to understand how documentary ­conventions intersect with questions of representation endemic to changing formulations of queer identity and community. Notions of queer community in the early 1990s were marked by coeval yet often paradoxical trends: on the one hand, gay and lesbian studies was transforming into queer theory, a move that saw the convergence of poststructuralist challenges to positivist epistemology and identity categories with the effects of feminist, gay and lesbian, and racial and ethnic activism both in and out of the academy. On the other hand, the boundaries of a visible queer community were being both solidified and expanded to include transgender and other newly queer subjects, bringing a growing sense of visibility, political clout, and heterogeneity and becoming in Judith Butler’s words, a community of subjects moved “from abjection to politicized affiliation” (Butler, 1993: 124). Central to this second trend is the celebration of diversity as an essential element of the expanding LGBTQ community, which was characterized by the valorization of cross-racial identification, affiliation, and desire. Central to the first trend is an articulation and awareness of the historical inequities undergirding these relations and the very categories of racial, gender, and sexual identity and community. In an article on Paris Is Burning, Robert E. Reid-Pharr equates the problematic liberalism of Paris Is Burning with the liberalism of early 1990s gay culture in the similar ways their celebration of cross-racial identification hinges on the spectacle of blackness without providing a context or an examination of the violence upon which such historical representations have been founded (Reid-Pharr, 1990). Both of the early 1990s trends discussed above are encompassed in Rich’s definition of the New Queer Cinema as an identifiable movement or body of work that can be claimed and celebrated as queer that simultaneously contains an ironic, suspicious, “pomo” relationship to ideas of historical knowledge, representation, and essentialized notions of identity. This paradox is similar to questions that accompany turn of the twenty-first century documentary cinema that has been influenced by the critical and formal innovations preceding it. Work from this period must reckon with audiences’ suspicions of conventions of realism and the potentially troubling politics of ethnographic modes of representation while still remaining a central weapon in the arsenal of political movements’ goals to draw attention to and advocate for marginalized groups and people. The overlap between cinematic conventions and political discourse emerges in the double valence of the verb “to represent,” which in one sense signals to speak on behalf of or stand in for, as in a political representative, and in another sense signals the desire to create a picture of or re-present. Gayatri Spivak describes the two denotations (advocacy and aesthetic) in her influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as “related but irreducibly discontinuous” (Spivak, 1988: 275).6 Documentary can be a place where those representational questions are foregrounded, but films about underrepresented or marginal groups, such as queer and



Reading Realness

255

transgender people of color, demand a particular reckoning with the ethically and politically charged histories of the forms of narrative and representation being employed by the film. This is what Bill Nichols in his 1991 book Representing Reality calls “axiographics,” addressing the question of how values, particularly an ethics of representation, comes to be known and experienced in relation to space. … How do the visual representations of the camera place the filmmaker in relation to the historical world? … The viewer’s relation to the image, then, is charged with an awareness of the politics and ethics of the gaze. (Nichols, 1991: 77)

As Nichols writes in the chapter “Representing the Body,” documentary films perform an ongoing negotiation between three domains against which the body is defined and apprehended: history, narrative, and myth. The historical domain refers to the “stickiness” of documentary images that are indexically linked to the historical realm outside of the film’s borders. According to Nichols, “[t]he historical domain, open-ended and contingent, lies at right angles to the closure of narrative” (1991: 249), but a narrative framework is necessary in order to lend coherence to the images and to avoid what could otherwise become a “senseless swirl of the anecdotal and eternally contingent” (264). Similarly, the mythical domain, by which filmmakers lend political significance or emotional power to bodies by producing them as symbols or icons, stands in contradictory yet dependent relation to the other two domains, providing an accessible frame through which to make sense of the “raw, inchoate flux of history” (264), yet also, like narrative, constantly threatening to subsume the historical into ideological coherence. While the balance between these three axes is negotiated differently in every documentary film, and, as I argue later, the balance can shift within a film depending upon the context in which it is seen, every documentary contains within it the contradictory challenge to shape and frame a narrative out of images, which are taken from an extra-filmic world that defies such domestication, and whose power draws from the historical residue that continues to stick to them.7 In this sense, a comparative and axiographical analysis of Paris Is Burning and Wildness allows us to see the challenge endemic to all documentary film: the impossibility of importing the full view of the universe of representational choices, with their myriad implications and histories, into a bounded and relatively static final product. While all documentary film involves some element of this negotiation, looking at the particular shape it takes in Paris Is Burning and Wildness allows us to better understand the competing regimes of realness and realism within documentaries during their historical moments, particularly in terms of the way that queer sexuality, race, and gender function in relation to one another and in relation to documentary conventions. This essay puts into conversation documentary’s vexed relationship with reality and the specific political questions of representation and identity raised by the concept of “realness” in two documentaries about transgender people of color. For the

256

Eve Oishi

purposes of this essay, I will be distinguishing between the terms “reality” (as synonymous with “the real”), “realism,” and “realness.” Realism is used to describe a cinematic device used to indexically reference reality, or the material and historical world outside the cinematic frame. “Realness” is a performance mode that calls into question notions of both reality and realism. Most obviously, realness is the standard by which the queens from Paris Is Burning are judged at the balls. Their performances sometimes involve gender drag but also encompass categories in which competitors are judged on their ability to realistically dress, walk, and pass as, for example, a Wall Street executive, a military officer, a butch straight man, or a “banjee boy or banjee girl,” who are, in the words of one emcee in the film, “the ones who tried to rob you on your way to the ball.” In their article, “Docudrag, or ‘Realness’ as a Documentary Strategy: Felix Rodriguez’s One Moment in Time (1992)” Marcus Becquer and Alisa Lebow define “realness” in this way: “Realness” here is the attribute of a performance that involves creating the best imitation possible in a manner so convincing, yet tacitly so illegitimate, that any notion of the real may be called into question … An essential part of its structure is based on undermining belief as well – an undermining that may then lead to a refiguring of the very notion of belief. (Becquer and Lebow, 1996: 145)

Later in this essay, I discuss the ways in which this definition of realness can offer a view of what is at stake in various formal choices within the documentaries under discussion. In particular, I am interested in realness as a performance that variously can and cannot be “read” for its artifice and power dynamics. Jennie Livingston’s 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning offered a view of black and Latino drag ball culture in New York to a wider audience and gave film and gender studies scholars rich material to consider the relationship between “realness,” performance, identity, and documentary representation. It was the first glimpse that many viewers had to the ball subculture that had been around since the 1930s. The film utilized explanatory title cards to introduce insider concepts such as “realness” and “throwing shade,” a gesture of translation that confirms the fact that the film is addressing itself to viewers outside of the ball scene. But although Paris Is Burning was singular in its success and mainstream visibility, it is important to frame its impact within a broader context of queer media and activism, and queer theory. Such a contextualization allows us to understand how the axiographics of the film are linked to questions of representation, community, and queer identity that were evolving outside the frame of the film, specifically the ways in which an imagined queer community was being produced and expanded in the early 1990s through the intersection of cinematic representation, political activism, and academic theory. Paris Is Burning can be read in relation to both the urgent and frequently experimental works of AIDS activist documentary that often exposed the ways in which media and political structures marginalized and distorted the experiences of poor people and people of color, as well New Queer Cinema’s proliferation of narrative



Reading Realness

257

feature films authored by gay and lesbian filmmakers. While AIDS activist media and New Queer Cinema included a lot of experimentation within the idea of documentary production, Paris Is Burning hews more closely to traditional forms with its ethnographic distance between the subject and audience/filmmaker. For this reason, it is also the documentary from that period that had the most mainstream success. Paris Is Burning contains a progressive impulse to bring to visibility previously marginalized and unknown people and cultures that also anticipates and contributes to a future mainstreaming of queer culture, people, and issues. By giving visibility and narrative legibility to its previously relatively unknown subjects, Paris Is Burning helped to produce them as queer subjects, members of a larger LGBT community whose contours were being rapidly refigured during this period. This is not to say that Venus Extravaganza and Peppa LaBeiga were not historical subjects and actors before their appearance in the film nor is the documentary Paris Is Burning solely responsible for the visibility, careers, or cultural significance of the people featured in the film. However, aligning with larger political trends during the period, the film can be seen as making an argument for the inclusion of black and Latino queens within discourses of queer life and political consciousness. Indeed, since the film’s release, balls have become more connected to a broader queer activist movement. In 1989, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), an activist and service organization formed in New York to respond to the AIDS pandemic, formed the House of Latex, which began to host its own balls. The idea was to target at-risk communities, particularly low-income black and Latino gay men already involved in the ball scene, and to develop safer sex and AIDS awareness and prevention strategies that worked in concert with existing cultural forms, codes, and practices. Merging a culture that had been previously unknown to many gay activists with a more mainstream gay political framework and activist network, the House of Latex, like Paris Is Burning, represents the ways in which the AIDS crisis and its activist responses helped to identify and interpellate previously marginalized or invisible gay people as subjects of a larger politicized queer community. In the intervening years, drag balls, particularly the newly developed youth circuit of “Kiki” balls, have become a primary site of safer sex education and outreach by community health activists. The mainstream coverage of Paris Is Burning was generally positive, but the film has proven to be a rich site of debate and discussion among scholars and cultural critics. Probably the best-known and most abiding critique of the film came from bell hooks, who took issue both with how the subjects of the film understand and represent the function and significance of drag balls as well as Livingston’s documentary style. According to hooks, the queens’ own discourse about the drag balls can be read as “both progressive and reactionary” in their articulation of the liberatory function of fantasy and in what she sees as their selfsabotaging aspiration towards an ideal of white, upper-class, heterosexual femininity (hooks, 1992: 149). Her main objection is Livingston’s uncritical embrace of traditional ethnographic film techniques through the absenting of her own body. She writes:

258

Eve Oishi

Since her presence as white woman/lesbian filmmaker is “absent” from Paris Is Burning it is easy for viewers to imagine that they are watching an ethnographic film documenting the life of black gay “natives” and not recognize that they are watching a work shaped and formed by a perspective and standpoint specific to Livingston. (hooks, 1992: 151)8

In her chapter on Paris Is Burning from Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” Judith Butler disagrees with hooks’s reading of the drag performances as misogynist and celebrates the film subjects’ reimagination of affective structures of family. But she too raises the ethical implications of the filmmaker’s camera, in particular the filmmaker’s cross-identification with the subjects in the film, which makes itself felt obliquely through Livingston’s decision to focus on the alternative family structures of the ball houses. Butler writes that, “as a lesbian, [Livingston] apparently maintains some kind of identificatory bond with the gay men in the film and also, it seems, with the kinship system, replete with ‘houses,’ ‘mothers,’ and ‘children,’ that sustains the drag ball scene and is itself organized by it” (Butler, 1993: 134). Yet Butler sees the filmmaker’s lesbian desire, which is predicated upon a cross-identification with groups that are marginalized from heteronormativity (hence the appeal of alternative family structures), as also attached to a desire for phallic power over the tools of representation, a power that ultimately serves to domesticate the black and Latino subjects of the film. She asks, “what is the status of the desire to feminize black and Latino men that the film enacts? Does this not serve the purpose, among others, of a visual pacification of subjects by whom white women are imagined to be socially endangered?” (1993: 135). Butler continues, “is this fantasy of the camera’s power not directly counter to the ethnographic conceit that structures the film?” (135–136). In other words, Livingston’s desire as an absent but framing presence is antithetical to the film’s stance as the neutral ethnography that hooks is accusing it of being. While the film may be assuming a “privileged location of ‘innocence’” by absenting the white lesbian filmmaker from the screen (hooks, 1992: 151), Butler argues that the visual and narrative frame of the film is serving a specific function for a lesbian audience, namely to simultaneously claim an identification and shared sense of marginalization and exercise the phallic power of engendering its black and Latino subjects. Ultimately, Butler’s assessment of the film’s potential to destabilize normative regimes of power and meaning remains contingent upon individual spectators’ responses to the packaging of the “performances” within the film. This will determine whether the ethnographic form of the film serves to reinforce or unsettle viewers’ dominant ideas about truth, representation, and difference. To this end, Butler’s analysis is aligned with hooks, as she suggests that the process of opening up a critical distance for the viewer is hindered by Livingston’s failure to make herself more present. She writes, “I would have liked to have seen the question of Livingston’s cinematic desire reflexively thematized in the film itself, her intrusions into the frame as ‘intrusions,’ the camera implicated in the trajectory of desire that it seems compelled to incite” (Butler, 1993: 136). The wish, expressed by both hooks and



Reading Realness

259

Butler, that Livingston make herself more visible in the film are responses to this way of thinking about the power dynamics of reading the other. Her invisibility forecloses a reading of her own desires and implication within regimes of power and representation. The film’s own opacity and resistance to being “read” by viewers and critics must be unpacked through a deeper discussion of the categories of both “reading” and “realness” within the film. Butler’s discusses “realness” as “morphological ideal” that is inherently connected to a culturally specific practice of “reading.” She writes: what determines the effect of realness is the ability to compel belief, to produce the naturalized effect … Significantly, this is a performance that works, that effects realness, to the extent that it cannot be read. For “reading” means taking someone down, exposing what fails to work at the level of appearance, insulting or deriding someone. For a performance to work, then, means that a reading is no longer possible, or that a reading, an interpretation, appears to be a kind of transparent seeing, where what appears and what it means coincide. (Butler, 1993: 129)

Becquer and Lebow extend Butler’s definition of realness to include the pleasure in the performance itself. If, according to Butler, realness works “to the extent that it cannot be read,” Becquer and Lebow point out that “it also must be read in order to work. Much of its pleasure comes precisely from this paradoxical ‘reading’ of what presumably cannot be read” (Becquer and Lebow, 1996: 145). Jackie Goldsby offers a valuable refinement of this discussion by pointing to the power relations inherent in the act of “reading” as opposed to “throwing shade” or “shading”: In the ball world the children clarify the workings of power in signifyin(g) exchanges because they split the notion into two forms: “reading” and “shading.” Where the former is an insult that occurs between dissimilarly advantaged speakers, the latter happens when two similarly positioned speakers square off to spar verbally. … To  “throw shade,” on the other hand, one addresses an equal on the sly. (Goldsby, 1993: 114)

A discussion of reading realness that pays attention to the dual nature of “reading” (both seeing through the artifice and calling out the flaws) also offers us a more nuanced perspective on the reality status of documentary itself. Becquer and Lebow introduce the term “docudrag” in part as a way of linking the performative nature of all documentary with the politics of drag. They argue that realness “encourages us to see documentary practice as characterized not by a privileged aesthetic link between documentary and the real, but as an engaged and embattled attempt to pass as real in a history laden with issues of representation, power, and desire” (Becquer and Lebow, 1996: 160). According to critics of Paris Is Burning, the conventions of ethnographic film are potentially reactionary in that they resist being “read” in both Butler’s sense of “exposing what fails to work at the level or appearance” and in Goldsby’s sense of a

260

Eve Oishi

calling out that is structured around an inherent asymmetry of power (Butler, 1993: 129). In Butler’s terms, “[t]he impossibility of reading means that the artifice works, the approximation of realness appears to be achieved, the body performing and the ideal performed appear indistinguishable” (129). In this sense, the film’s ethnographic distance between film and filmmaker effectively mimics reality and thus prevents viewers from “reading” or discerning the uncomfortable power dynamics inherent in the film’s presentation of its subjects. Reading the realness of Paris Is Burning and Wildness, in other words, examining their attempts simultaneously to “pass as real” and to produce pleasurable commentaries on the politics of their own representations, allows us to understand the ways in which their cinematic dilemmas are intimately linked to larger political questions. What the shift from one film to the next shows us is that the problem is not just how to represent the lives on screen but how documentary conventions that both depend on and disavow realism must adapt in response to changing definitions of queer subjectivity. Such an investigation raises the questions: who is marginal and what are the visual conventions through which those subjects have ambivalently come into focus? Who has historically been given the power of self-representation? Wildness, by first-time filmmaker Tsang, found immediate success in the film festival and art world. It premiered at MOMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media, was chosen for the Whitney Biennial as well as the South by Southwest Film Festival, and was awarded the Grand Jury Award for Outstanding Documentary Feature Film at Outfest: Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. The subject of Wildness is the meeting between two queer communities at the historic Silver Platter bar in Los Angeles’s Macarthur Park neighborhood. When filmmaker Tsang first encountered the bar, frequented mostly by gay and transgender Latino/a immigrants, he immediately felt drawn to the space and its patrons. In 2008 Tsang, along with three collaborators, began hosting a weekly party and performance event, called Wildness, bringing an ethnically diverse, largely queer avant-garde arts scene to the bar. The film is narrated in the first person by two distinct voices. The first is “Wu,” who is voiced by the filmmaker and represents a young, idealistic artist and community activist who struggles with the challenges of bringing the two worlds together and expresses confusion and remorse over his personal actions that lead to Wildness’s eventual demise. The second voice belongs to the bar itself, voiced in Spanish by Marianna Marroquin, a transgender community activist from Guatemala, who is the Silver Platter personified. “The Silver Platter” speaks in a whispered voice and uses poetic imagery that connotes an archetypically wise and transcendent maternal spirit reminiscent of the voice of Cuba in the 1964 Soviet film I Am Cuba. The bar describes how she has become a safe haven to “children,” the youngest of whom is Tsang, seeking community and self-expression. While the Silver Platter regulars express mixed feelings of bemusement, estrangement, or connection with the patrons of Wildness, the bar frames what the artists are doing as tearing “down the walls people put up around artistic expression.” While “Wu” questions his own decisions, “The Silver Platter” affirms the beauty and creative and political significance of the brief period of Wildness’s existence.9



Reading Realness

261

Through his blog, Tsang details his decision, made with co-writer Roya Rastegar, to make himself a visible presence in the film, both as an onscreen subject and through his voice-over. He writes that while the Silver Platter’s narrative was written in collaboration with Marroquin and inspired by interviews with the bar’s patrons, “both [Wu and Silver Platter] are a composite of me and [co-writer] roya” (Tsang, 2012a). Through interviews with the bar’s owner, Gonzalo Ramirez, his ex-boyfriend and bar manager, Koky, and Koky’s current partner, bartender Javier, Tsang reveals the evolving history of the bar. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s affected the demographics of the bar as did the influx of Central American refugees fleeing the oppression and violence of civil wars. This era marked the beginning of the bar’s current incarnation, a meeting place for mostly Latino/a immigrants from Mexico and Central American, many of them transgender women. Tsang, who had recently moved to the area from Chicago, was taken to the bar one night by friends and immediately felt at home. In 2008 Tsang, along with three collaborators (DJs Ashton Mines, Ashma Maroof, and Daniel Pineda), began hosting a weekly Tuesday night party, Wildness, which mirrored the bar’s regular Friday drag performance night. The party quickly took off, and Tsang and his collaborators curated a broad range of performances from established art world stars like Ron Athey and Ryan Trecartin to legendary drag performer Flawless Sabrina to lesserknown local artists working in a number of genres. As the bar narrates: “My children were stitching together pieces that didn’t fit. They tore down the walls people put up around artistic expression. They broke the opera out of the house, queens out of their cabaret revues, and art out of the gallery. And all these fractured parts came together to share a night inside me.” As the film chronicles, responses by the Silver Platter regulars to the multiracial, mostly queer, bohemian bourgeois Wildness crowd were mixed. Interviews with staff and patrons of the bar describe confusion, curiosity, and a feeling of being marginalized by these “gringos of every color.” One key strand in the film tracks the ways in which the introduction of the “outsider” presence of the artists and audience of Wildness exposed the imbricated issues of gentrification, immigration, class, and gay politics as they affect the queer and trans Latino/a patrons of the Macarthur Park bar. As the party gained in popularity, mainstream and queer media sources began to give it coverage, including a sensationalized and transphobic review in the LA Weekly that identified it as LA’s “Best Tranny Bar.” Tsang became concerned that the party’s exposure was inviting visitors who were not respectful of the Silver Platter and also introducing a new level of risk to its regular patrons, many of whom were undocumented. The Wildness organizers began to hear accusations that their presence was an unwelcome and colonizing one, a repetition of the familiar pattern of queers and artists who often form the avant garde of neighborhood gentrification in a process that can end with the original inhabitants of low-income areas being moved out once the area has been made fashionable by people like the Wildness clientele. Throughout this process, Tsang also became closer to the owners and staff at the bar as well as many of the patrons. After learning more about the legal struggles that

262

Eve Oishi

transgender immigrants face, he and some fellow activists founded a legal clinic that also included HIV testing and other services in an empty storefront next to the bar. During this period, the bar’s owner, Gonzalo, died, initiating a legal conflict within Gonzalo’s family that resulted in Koky and Javier losing their jobs. Tsang, who had grown close to Koky and Javier, sided with them, and used the legal resources of the law clinic to help them with their case. In the meantime, the weekly Wildness event was canceled. The conflict was eventually resolved, and Tsang made up with Gonzalo’s siblings. They invited the organizers to bring Wildness back, but, as Tsang says in the film, “The moment had passed.” The success of the party had afforded Tsang and his collaborators a growing number of international opportunities that were taking their careers in new directions, one of which would become the feature documentary, Wildness. The finished product mixes footage from the Tuesday night Wildness performances and the regular Friday night drag shows, interviews with the Silver Platter staff and some patrons, interviews with Wildness organizers, staged scenes of Tsang alone and with Silver Platter patrons, footage of the Macarthur Park neighborhood, and a news conference in response to the murder of Paulina Ibarra, a young transgender woman. Through the process of making the film, Tsang found himself contending with multiple and often conflicting positions and voices. His blog tracks the difficulty of finding a point of representation for himself – as a queer artist of color who had grown close to the patrons of the Silver Platter and had become an ally in internal struggles within the bar and as an “outsider” who, as the promoter of Wildness, was implicated in the new publicity and gentrification brought to the bar through the popular weekly party. Layered over this history is an awareness of both the troubling history of the ethnographic gaze and the instability of an authentic “I” in autoethnographic films engaging with a commitment to the LGBT politics of making visible and central the stories of marginalized people. In one blog entry just after the film’s premier at Toronto’s Hot Docs Festival, Tsang responds to critical reviews that he has read in the Toronto press that take issue with the way he crafted the two characters of himself and the bar.10 In response, he defends his decision to make himself such a central voice and presence throughout the film: these reactions feel so connected to something major we struggled with, when creating the story: how to portray the “women of the silver platter” – who are the main subject of the film – without exploiting them? it’s funny how in documentary, one of the most powerful ways to assert authority as a director, is to disappear. because it creates the illusion of objectivity and truth for viewers, so they can sit back and comfortably be voyeur to a world they’re outside of. i’ve seen a lot of problematic films about trans people of color like this, with invisible directors. (Tsang, 2012a)

The blog entry is accompanied by a screen shot of Jennie Livingston’s 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning.



Reading Realness

263

Along with the film’s co-writer Roya Rastegar, Tsang decided to create two narrators who would tell the story of the bar and of Wildness in first-person voice-over. As Tsang describes in an interview for Art in America, “It’s me and the bar, and I’m this young, idealistic person, and the bar is a parental figure, who loves me but gets really annoyed with me when I’m being stupid … It’s a love story between me and the bar” (Walleston, 2012). While the Wu narrator is young and impetuous, searching for the key to unlock the secrets to communal harmony that the bar keeps hidden, the Silver Platter unquestioningly accepts Wu and Wildness as part of an extended family. When the party has ended, the Silver Platter has the last word on its significance, saying that the meeting between the two worlds had been “fractured, imperfect, and so so beautiful.” Within the umbrella of a broadened queer community of the early twenty-first century, the two communities represented in Wildness, the Wildness partygoers and the Silver Platter regulars, are presented to be at least overlapping, if not aligned in their interests, identities, and allegiances. Both can be called queer and/ or transgender and/or of color. However, the film also examines the ways in which differences of language, class, history, and power reveal themselves in ways not fully accounted for by many progressive, political, or academic narratives of queer community and identity. The bar’s identification of the Wildness attendees as “gringos of every shade” represents the Friday night regulars’ recognition of the class, language, and educational divisions that separate the two groups, elevating certain people of color into “gringo” status. Nicol, who works the door at the Silver Platter, describes the Tuesday night crowd as “from the university,” and “more cool” in her attempt to find language to capture what separates these two groups of queers. In its use of first-person narrative, Tsang’s appearances on camera, and the recording and representation of the Wildness parties, the film can be considered a form of autoethnography; yet Tsang is not a clear-cut “insider” to the Silver Platter community, and his blog testifies to his consciousness of the previous critiques of “outsider” filmmakers like Livingston, who insufficiently foreground their own position and motivations. By contrast, Wildness features the director and takes as its main subject the “messiness” of cross-identification and of the contact between different groups. But Tsang’s blog entries and press interviews as well as interviews in the film with the party organizers register a recurring conflict between, on the one hand, taking responsibility for his own implication in the fact that Wildness, both the party and the film, bring attention and publicity to people who may be vulnerable because they are undocumented, poor, or transgender, and, on the other hand, questioning the arrogance and privilege implicit in a desire to “protect” the film’s subjects.11 The device of the bar in part functions to negotiate this tension. Just as Butler identifies the central focus on repurposed kinship structures in Paris Is Burning as indicative of a form of Livingston’s queer cross-identification with her film’s subjects, the Silver Platter’s self-representation as a mother to her many generations of “children” serves a similar function to bring the many diverse sets of actors into familial relation to one another.

264

Eve Oishi

On October 2, 2008, writer Sam Slovick wrote in LA Weekly: Finally! A crossroads convergence of self-involved, art-damaged 20-something kids and Third World gender illusionists at a water hole whose geography transcends the expanse of Silver Lake proper. … This is a lovely little pit stop where a she-male doing car dates can stop in for a breather. A place where a lady-boy can take a load off her feet and wipe a load off her skirt before getting back to business in the back of a Toyota. (Slovick, 2008)

Outraged by the language of the piece, Tsang helped to successfully convince LA Weekly that the article brought unwelcome attention and danger to the undocumented customers of the bar, and it was the first article to be removed from the publication’s website. The film features an extended interview with an admonished and apologetic Slovick. Even as Slovick is cast as a threat to the bar, the film’s sequence in which a visibly uncomfortable Slovick is made to recant his review in front of a stoically outraged Tsang, functions partly to obscure the more complex relationship that Tsang, as promoter of a popular weekly party at the Silver Platter, holds to the publicity and attention being brought to the bar community. At the same time, the attempt by the film to serve as rebuttal to the undeniably lurid and transphobic narrative presented by Slovick contributes to an elision of some of the details referenced in the review, specifically the presence of sex work. While drugs are mentioned once by one of the interviewees, and prostitution is discussed as a fact of life by bar patron Rosario in quotes included in Tsang’s Whitney Biennial catalogue essay, this aspect of life at the Silver Platter remains largely invisible in the film (Tsang, 2012b: 263). The decision to avoid direct references to the darker sides of the subjects’ lives would seem to come in response to both the sensationalistic treatment of transgender people exemplified by the LA Times review and to criticisms of Paris Is Burning. In contrast to the avant-garde artists of the Tuesday night Wildness parties, who are shot in a rough vérité style, the patrons of the Silver Platter are all presented in highly stylized, staged, and art-directed scenes. There is no visual distinction made between the off- or onstage lives of the Silver Platter patrons. They are frequently called “beauties,” there is a sense that the performance of a flawless beauty and elegance is central to their identity, and their stories are inextricably tied to an overt sense of performance. The dual nature of the filming styles reveals an awareness of the differential social status of the immigrant transwomen and the organizers and artists of the Tuesday night party. The Latina “beauties” are framed through a glamorous and stylized performance of realness which remains at the level of surface and therefore cannot be “read” and which functions as a protective veil for the film’s “endangered” subjects. Such protection is not necessary for the other queer, trans, and non-white artists who perform at Wildness, whose “realness” is not a central concern of the film. These artists and club-goers do not warrant the same care to be taken about their representation due to the protections they are already afforded through class, legal status, nationality, and other securities. As “new” queer subjects, ones who are being introduced to both the physical and rhetorical spaces of a queer community, the women of



Reading Realness

265

the Silver Platter are seen as more vulnerable and as more in need of the armature of narrative. The different visual and political status of the film’s various subjects opens up a space for the historical context of the film to emerge, allowing us a glimpse of the contrapuntal narratives of political emergence and the different stakes for communities and subjects whose citizenship, both in the United States and within an imagined queer nation, are at differential levels of legibility. Tsang employs a number of strategies, including making himself a visible presence in the film and mixing magical realist elements with more traditional realist techniques, to counter the “mistakes” of Jennie Livingston. The conflicts that may have arisen from the encounter of incommensurate queer subjects is largely embodied by “Wu” as an intermediary character who moves between the two worlds. He is shown in both stylized, staged ways and in reality footage. Poorly lit footage of Tsang at Wildness events is juxtaposed against beautifully lit and framed scenes of an enraptured Wu staring up at the Silver Platter neon sign to illustrate his first encounter with the bar’s allure, or crumpled dejectedly on the sidewalk in front of the locked gate of the bar after his estrangement from the bar’s owners. Begun as a film about the Silver Platter, sensitive to the pitfalls of the ethnographic gaze, Tsang reverses course to eventually make a film about himself and his party. Yet, the crisis of reality remains as a return of the repressed within the structure of the film. Even though it is about Tsang, it is the bar, as the personification of the aggregated clientele within the Silver Platter, who uses the power of myth to tell us what Wu and Wildness are. The power to produce Wu and the Silver Platter queens is given to the Silver Platter, obscuring the fact that the bar’s voice is an extension and expression of Tsang’s authorial power. These devices serve a protective function for the filmmaker as well. As a strategy to avoid the mistakes of Paris Is Burning, the dual narrators and the presence of the filmmaker in the text were in part created to prevent the film and filmmaker from being “read” by critics in the ways that Livingston was read. In some ways, however, these strategies threaten to obscure the director’s position even more than if he had simply remained invisible, for, as the critical literature on Paris Is Burning testifies, Livingston’s invisibility has become one of the most visible sites of discourse and analysis in her film’s legacy. Butler takes issue with Paris Is Burning for the way in which the camera “trades on the masculine privilege of the disembodied gaze, the gaze that has the power to produce bodies, but which is itself no body” (Butler, 1993: 136). In distinction to the earlier film, Tsang’s gaze is not disembodied. The wish for cross-identification and community through both erotic desire and political means is stated explicitly. And yet, the film still cannot escape the axiographic reality that all documentary filmmaking involves the power to “produce bodies.” Even if the gaze is not disembodied, if the body of the filmmaker is in the film, the narrative and visual frames that a filmmaker uses arrive freighted with their own ideological cargo, sticky with the residue of power inequalities existing outside the screen. In this case, the filmmaker’s voice is heard in dialogue with that of the bar, but the bar is given final authority to tell us the meaning of this particular moment in time and space. Its function is to paper over the very cracks that are opened up by the footage in the film as well as in Tsang’s blog.

266

Eve Oishi

The documentaries I discuss must grapple with the challenges set for all documentary film: the task of bridging the gap between the dynamic political and cultural worlds that are the subject of the films and the forms available for representing them. Realness carries within it the awareness of distance between the representation and the magnitude of lived experience. The incoherence of the “reality” of Wildness gestures towards the excess and horizon of history, its “wildness” that is constantly eluding the frame of documentary. On the other hand, the careful staging of the Silver Platter women illustrates the difficulty of walking the line between representing a narrative or mythical subject and an agent of history, as can be evidenced by the film most vulnerable subjects who later disappear, either through deportation or murder. The tensions in Wildness illustrate the fact that the contradictions in early 1990s queer community formation and cinema are still with us today. The film encapsulates paradoxical impulses: on the one hand the desire to close the gap of difference that underwrites liberal notions of queer community and a self-reflexive suspicion of identity politics. Wildness can be read as both the voice of a young filmmaker who is committed to avoiding the charges of insensitivity or exploitation leveled at earlier films while at the same time making an accessible film that performs documentary’s very traditional function of advocating for a socially marginalized group. In so doing, the film must inevitably come up against a foundational conflict: the closure of narrative and myth vs. the “wildness” of history. To speak “for” another must always entail imposing a narrative or a frame. Wildness tries to address the problems of Paris Is Burning through self-reflexivity and experimentation, but the problem is endemic in the documentary impulse toward realism, which is bound up in its advocacy function. Critics took issue with Paris Is Burning because it resisted being read (in the sense of discerning the artifice in its production), and they in turn read the film (in the sense of criticizing or “throwing shade”) for its limitations. Tsang attempts to make a film that cannot be read (criticized) by critics but can be read (seen through) for its self-reflexivity. As my partial review of the critical literature shows, Paris Is Burning has been a site for an ongoing discussion about the axiographics of different documentary conventions and choices. Who is represented and how are they enmeshed in established regimes of representation and power? While scholars have criticized Paris Is Burning for its unproblematized ethnographic gaze, the historical context outside of the film continues to stick to and remake its images, rearranging the relationship between the domains of history, myth, and narrative, and preventing the film from ever being closed. As Nichols writes, “the body represented by a documentary film must be understood in relation to a historical context which is a referent, not an ontological ground. History is where pain and death occur but it is in representation that these facts and events gain meaning” (Nichols, 1991: 265). These regimes of representation, while linked to histories of struggle, exploitation, and control, are themselves not fixed and are subject to constant revision and negotiation. There is a scene about halfway through Paris Is Burning that I have never seen discussed in the critical literature. Robbie Pendavis is sitting on the pier describing



Reading Realness

267

one of his “stunts,” which involved going to Roy Rogers and stealing food. In order to illustrate his point, he asks the filmmaker, who is off-camera, how much she paid for her sandwich. We hear Livingston off-screen saying, “I don’t know. Around five dollars?” “Around five do?!!!!” Robbie is momentarily shocked into stopping his narrative until he quickly collects himself and continues, laughing, “Make no mistakes. We got your five dollars back.” For a brief second the interviewee is brought up short by the thought that anyone would or could pay $5 for a sandwich. The vastness of the economic rift between the two interlocutors is suddenly made palpable, in the form of a stammer that momentarily interrupts the flow of the story being told carelessly and easily, as if between equals. As evidenced by the proliferation of scholarly literature on Paris Is Burning, ongoing political and critical discourse outside of the film’s frame has produced perspectives that continue to reframe how viewers “read” the film, what and how it represents. Looking back at Paris Is Burning after 20 years allows us to see the ways in which, despite its use of a traditional ethnographic model, that text was never closed. The “invisible” filmmaker has, in the intervening two decades, been made visible and brought to the forefront of discussions about the film by viewers, filmmakers, scholars, and critics concerned with the axiographics of the documentary gaze, and it has shaped the aesthetic and formal choices of a later generation of filmmakers who themselves struggle with the persuasive power seemingly afforded by a tight narrative frame or the vulnerability and risks of allowing the wildness of history to make its presence felt. It has continued to be read and re-read, the changing insights it yields a testimony to the impure tools of film. While a self-conscious foregrounding of the filmmaker and the apparatus can open up a critical space for the viewer, the proliferation of autobiographical and self-reflexive representations means that this technique does not inoculate a film or a viewer from hegemonic forms. As such, “the reach of [the] signifiability [of a discursive production] cannot be controlled by the one who utters or writes, since such productions are not owned by the one who utters them. They continue to signify in spite of their authors, and sometimes against their authors’ most precious intentions” (Butler, 1993: 241).

Notes 1 A New York Times article about the film states that Miramax claimed that Paris Is Burning grossed just over $4 million in US theatrical distribution (Green, 1993). In an interview in Indiewire.com, Livingston states that “for two whole weeks the film was listed in Variety as the highest grossing film, per screen, in the country … ‘Paris’ made four times as much money as ‘Slacker’ and a million more than ‘Reservoir Dogs’” (Hernandez, 2005). 2 José Esteban Muñoz writes that “Paris Is Burning presented a highly sensationalized rendering of Latino and black transvestite and transsexual communities.” In comparing the film unfavorably to two other documentaries about transgender people of color in New York – Susana Aiken and Carlos Aparicio’s Salt Mines (1990) and The Transformation (1996) – Muñoz writes that these films “resisted the impulse to glamorize the

268

3

4

5

6

7

Eve Oishi

e­ xperience in the way that Paris Is Burning does. Poverty and disease, for instance, have not been sacrificed in these videos for the sake of spectacle and style, as they were in Livingston’s film” (Muñoz, 1999: 162). “I really came to this documentary at a point where I was really fraught with making Wildness,” he said, “and there were many parallels that went into the production of the film because I was working in a community that I am a part of, but I am also an outsider to, and there are major race and class cultural tensions that arose from this party that I did with my friends at the bar” (Duray, 2012). An article and interview with Tsang in Art in America states that For How We Perceived a Life (2012) was in part motivated by the fact that the industry people who heard about Wildness would immediately respond, “Oh, it’s like Paris Is Burning,” as if “all films about queer people of color are alike” (Walleston, 2012). Both the performance piece Full Body Quotation (2011), developed for the Performa Series at New Museum, and the video For How We Perceived a Life (Take 3) (2012) that appeared in Ungovernables, the New Museum’s Triennial, take as their source material transcripts from interviews that Livingston conducted and edited for Paris Is Burning. In the new pieces, Tsang has actors perform the longer interviews from which Livingston cut her film in order to expose the ways in which the editing process reframed and changed the context and meaning of the original statements (Tan, 2011; Walleston, 2012). A quote from the March 3, 2011 blog entry by Tsang sums up some the process outlined above: “so when i started making the movie, i wanted to see this amazing solid community of transwomen, and make a film about their struggles. what i didn’t want to see was myself, and the role that my friends and our party was playing in shaping all of my fantasies about what i thought the silver platter was. at a certain point i had to come to terms with the fact that, as well intentioned as my fantasies were, in the spirit of radical transness, and celebratory of queer community of color, they were still fantasies. and i think there is nothing wrong with that, if you can own it. so this consciousness shift has been about saying THIS is about the silver platter, from the perspective of who i am and what i wanted, as an filmmaker, a community member, a person of a different ethnicity and class, as a friend, as someone who cared, as someone who fucked up – a person. one of many people” (Tsang, 2011). In this essay, Spivak takes Gilles Deleuze to task for the problematic blurring of the two valences of the word “representation” in a way that obscures the subject position of the French intellectual theorizing about subaltern classes. She writes, “Two senses of representation are being run together: representation as ‘speaking for’ as in politics, and the representation as ‘re-presentation,’ as in art or philosophy. Since theory is also only ‘action,’ the theoretician does not represent (speak for) the oppressed group. Indeed, the subject is not seen as a representative consciousness (one re-presenting reality adequately). These two senses of representation – within state formation and the law, on the one hand, in and subject-predication, on the other – are related but irreducibly discontinuous. To cover over the discontinuity with an analogy that is presented as a proof reflects again a paradoxical subject privileging” (Spivak, 1988: 275). As Nichols writes: “At stake in the documentary representation of the body is not only the courage to be, but the courage not to be, not to be represented strictly in terms of those potentially full and positive values running along the axes of history, myth, and narrative” (Nichols, 1991: 265).



Reading Realness

269

8 hooks continues: “By cinematically masking this reality (we hear her ask questions but never see her), Livingston does not oppose the way hegemonic whiteness ‘represents’ blackness, but rather assumes an imperial overseeing position that is in no way progressive or counter-hegemonic. By shooting the film using a conventional approach to documentary and not making clear how her standpoint breaks with this tradition, Livingston assumes a privileged location of ‘innocence’” (hooks, 1992: 151). 9 In the April 30, 2012 entry to his blog, Tsang writes, “my character is not actually me (the director) – it’s a version we invented of a young/idealistic/fallible foil to the bar, who has a wiser perspective. both voices are a composite of me and roya (rastegar, co-writer), and the bar is also culled from many testimonial interviews from the community” (Tsang, 2012a). 10 On April 30, 2012, Tsang writes that he had “picked up a thread of WILDNESS criticism from some Toronto press … either that my character is self-promotional, or that the bar is annoying” (Tsang, 2012a). He may have been referring to the following review from Film Freak Central in which Angelo Muredda takes issue with the use of the bar’s voice-over, writing: “Tsang’s acknowledgement of his egocentrism as the director of Wildness the film is welcome, I suppose, but he’s less graceful about his status as the founder of Wildness the party. When the bar’s owner passes away and the family disobeys his wish that the property be inherited by his male partner, Tsang and company pulled Wildness in protest. Tsang has the Silver Platter alternately scold him for his impetuousness and soberly give him props for taking a stand, which officially turns this complex portrait of a space into a faux self-critical, fawning self-portrait” (Muredda, 2012). 11 In an interview, Tsang states, “I dislike the word visibility, maybe because for me it evokes the rhetoric of assimilation – as IF the goal of trans/LGBT/whatever movements were about being seen and gaining acceptance from society – I don’t subscribe to that” (Wyma, 2012).

References Becquer, Marcus and Lebow, Alisa (1996) Docudrag, or “Realness” as a Documentary Strategy: Felix Rodriguez’s One Moment in Time (1992). In Noriega, Chon and López, Ana M. (eds.) Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts, pp. 143–170. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York and London: Routledge. Duray, Dan (2012) Meet Wu Tsang, Soon to Be Featured in Every Show in Town, http://­ galleristny.com/2012/02/meet-wu-tsang-soon-to-be-featured-in-every-show-in-town/, accessed July 28, 2014. Goldsby, Jackie (1993) Queens of Language: Paris Is Burning. In Gever, Martha (ed.) Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, pp. 108–115. New York: Routledge. Green, Jesse (1993) Paris Has Burned. New York Times, April 18 http://www.nytimes. com/1993/04/18/style/paris-has-burned.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm./, accessed July 28, 2014. Hernandez, Eugene (2005) 5 Questions for Jennie Livingston, Director of “Paris Is Burning” and “Who’s the Top?” Indiewire.com, August 6, http://www.indiewire.com/article/5_questions_for_ jennie_livingston_director_of_paris_is_burning_and_whos_the#/, accessed July 28, 2014.

270

Eve Oishi

hooks, bell (1992) Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press. Muñoz, José Esteban (1999) Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Muredda, Angelo (2012) Wildness (d. Wu Tsang). FCC Hot Docs Blog, http://filmfreakcentralhotdocsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/wildness-d-wu-tsang.html, accessed July 28, 2014. Nichols, Bill (1991) Representing Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Reid-Pharr, Robert E. (1990) The Spectacle of Blackness. Radical America, 24(4), 57–65. Rich, B. Ruby (2004) New Queer Cinema. In Aaron, Michele (ed.) New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader, pp. 15–22. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Slovick, Sam (2008) Best Tranny Bar: The Silver Platter. LA Weekly, October 2. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988) Can the Subaltern Speak? In Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, pp. 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tan, Lumi (2011) Wu Tsang’s Full Body Quotation. Performa Magazine, http://performamagazine.tumblr.com/post/13636493266/wu-tsangs-full-body-quotation/, accessed July 28, 2014. Tsang, Wu (2011) Story Thinking Behind the WILDNESS Title Part 2, http://www.wildnessmovie.com/class-blog/2011/3/3/story-thinking-behind-the-wildness-title-part-2.html, accessed July 28, 2014. Tsang, Wu (2012a) Self Promotion vs. Exploitation, http://www.wildnessmovie.com/­ class-blog/self-promotion-vs-exploitation.html/, accessed July 28, 2014. Tsang, Wu (2012b) Exhibition Catalogue. In Sussman, Elisabeth and Sanders, Jay (eds.) Whitney Biennial 2012, pp. 262–267. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Walleston, Aimee (2012) In Both Bi- and Triennial, Wu Tsang Talks Community. Art in  America, February 14, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/news/ 2012-02-14/wu-tsang/, accessed July 28, 2014. Wyma, Chloe (2012) “I Dislike the Word Visibility”: Wu Tsang on Sexuality, Creativity, and Conquering New York’s Museums. Artinfo.com, http://artinfo.com/news/story/761447/­ i-dislike-the-word-visibility-wu-tsang-on-sexuality-creativity-and-conquering-new-yorksmuseums/, accessed July 28, 2014.

Part V

Virus

Introduction Virus

Bishnupriya Ghosh

If you peruse DnaTube or EduTube, popular digital platforms for scientific documentaries that vivify natural processes imperceptible to the naked human eye, the complex processes of retroviral infection appear as adventures in outer space. These planetary excursions – cells bursting, drifting, morphing – locate us in intracellular matrices. A voice-of-god-narration turns process into story, celebrating “wetware” processes of freezing, staining, and dehydrating cells; the cryo-electron tomography that captures the virus at various stages of its life cycle; and the digital reconstruction of the full viral architecture. The body – the target of biotech innovations and biomedical interventions – is the final frontier in this cellular fantastic made possible by new cellular optical and computational technologies. Media design companies working with big pharmaceutical and university laboratories engineer these visualizations in order to stimulate research interest in the life sciences, and to sell drugs, therapies, and the featured technologies (optical instruments and software). Globally funded and globally available, such 3-D panoramas project a universal future, remaining unabashed in their managerial drive to represent planetary interests. The excitement over the technological prowess of documentary technologies manifest in this edutainment is a far cry indeed from the panic over the virus in the early 1980s, when the sudden emergence of viruses (Ebola, Marburg, HIV, H1N1) effectively scuttled the post-penicillin era mythos of winning the “war on germs.”1 It was not that this species of microbes, viruses, was a novelty to the scientific community. Too small to see under the light microscope (100–500 times smaller than bacteria), evidence of these “filterable agents” (escaping filters for bacteria), named “virus” (Latin for poison) in 1898,2 emerged as physically visible forms in the 1930s. The tobacco mosaic virus, the first microbe to be identified as a virus, was A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

274

Bishnupriya Ghosh

From 3-D animation of HIV replication cycle, scripted, storyboarded, and directed by Frank Schauder of Mackevision Media Design’s animation department, and funded by the multinational pharmaceutical company, Boehringer Ingelheim. Downloadable from http://www. edutube.org/video/3d-animation-hiv-replication, accessed August 12, 2014.

prepared in crystalline form for scientific observation under the electron microscope in 1938. Shortly thereafter, the virus appears as an object of scientific inquiry in micro-cinematography, where the first links between a biological agent and ­documentary practices emerge. Such historical junctures, in which human–virus ­relations enter a state of crisis and prompt documentary interventions, are the “conjugations” – a term from the biological sciences referring to cell-to-cell contact  – that organize the selection of essays presented in this section. The first of these conjugations involves the pathogenic virus as a biological agent of cellular catastrophe, an epistemological conjugation motivated by scientific inquiry. Once mid-nineteenth-century germ theory (formalized in the 1884 Koch postulates), establishing a causal relation between offending microbes and specific illnesses, strengthened the scientific will to identify microbes and to track their behaviors in the human body and in populations, and once it was understood that viruses, invisible to the naked eye, required optical mediation for the project of “knowing” them, the epistemological rationale for documenting the virus was confirmed. The documentary form – its indexical claims, its editorial capacity to freeze, edit, and organize viral cycles, its explanatory power to narrate – appeared especially relevant to the ongoing scientific research and pedagogy necessary for biomedical intervention in viral action. The section therefore begins with an essay that represents the indissoluble link forged in scientific and medical practice between documentary cinema and the virus. Kirsten Ostherr’s study spans the 100 years of

Introduction 275 scientific documentaries on the virus, focusing on two films that bookend those years: Julius Ries’s Fertilization and Development of the Sea Urchin Egg (1907) and XVIVO’s 3-D computer animation  The Inner Life of the Cell (2006), films with ­radically different modes of indexical capture and expressivity. A scholar of scientific documentary studies, Ostherr argues that the informatic image merges the lure of the “cinema of attractions” with the authenticating heft of photographic realism to produce extraordinarily riveting encounters with microbial life in general. Under the guise of objective documentation, the narrative and aesthetic strategies of scientific and medical documentaries organize, analyze, even “theorize” the images of microbial life produced by sophisticated optical technologies and computational processes. If these are socially persuasive documents, as Ostherr’s analysis suggests, they inevitably raise the question of value: are human living organisms equivalent to microbial life as the discourse of scientific objectivity suggests? The larger cultural question is about how to coexist with “obligate parasites” that require an animate host for their survival but can, in periods of ecological disequilibrium, threaten that host. What role do scientific documentaries play in providing implicit and provisional answers? Do they advocate living with the virus in a state of perpetual war, an uneasy truce, or mutual interdependence? The ongoing conjugations between scientific research on the virus and documentary continue into the present era of the cellular fantastic, as we have seen, the emphasis shifting from large ethical questions to displays of technological bravado in the expressive documentation of the virus. Those ethical questions surface elsewhere, however, in a second set of explicitly ideological conjugations where the virus appears as the historical agent of trauma. Here a particular virus, HIV, becomes the central focus of social and political documentaries. A true emergence,3 HIV erupts in human populations in the early 1980s in a surprise attack whose much-debated origin is 1969.4 Aggressively spreading in human populations, its radical transformations of social relations found documentary articulation across multiple media platforms; in this scene, the virus appears as the historical catalyst for social destruction and consequent creative action. The hysterical rhetoric of “contagion” – or pathologized human–human, human–animal, and human–microbe contact5 – turned biological emergence into a social catastrophe, inaugurating a war of images. That well-known visual hysteria is the context for the documentary activism of the “epidemic era,” roughly understood as  the decade before the anti-retroviral “cocktails” hit the market in 1995–1996. The major push for social change, as the histories of ACT UP, Queer Nation, and the General Idea reveal, took aim at public policy, funding HIV/AIDS research, prevention (clean needles, condoms, advertising), and care (counseling, hospices, alternative medicine). Documentary filmmakers entered the fray with Stuart Marshall’s Bright Eyes (1984, BBC Channel 4), a film about British sexual mores and public indifference, making a splash as the first full-length documentary about AIDS. A spate of others followed across the Atlantic: memorably Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s award-winning Common Threads (1989) on the story of the NAMES quilt, a major

276

Bishnupriya Ghosh

theatrical release, and Roger Spottiswoode’s star-studded HBO documentary, And the Band Played On (1993), the somewhat tepid televisual account of the battle over “discovering” the HIV retrovirus, adapted from Randy Shilts’s (1987) “non-fiction”6 exposé. Such ventures joined popular print journalistic efforts to raise consciousness regarding the epidemic.7 These well-funded efforts are a stark contrast to the independent film and video production of queer activist documentarians whose prodigious output in the pre“cocktail” era archived the epidemic, criticized its social and political causes, and mourned the huge losses within queer communities and communities that were largely invisible as a national tragedy. Often shot on video, with small-scale exhibition (cafes, museums, universities, community access cable channels), these documentaries provide a social history of viral emergence; their word-of-mouth circulation epitomizes viral media before the advent of the digital. Peter Friedman and Tom Joslin’s wrenching Silverlake Life: A View From Here (1993) bearing witness to the “life,” biological and social, of two dying lovers; Gregg Bordowitz’s films on HIV-infection (notably Fast Trip, Long Drop, 1993); and Alex Juhasz’s unforgettable video of her dying friend, Jim Lamb, Video Remains (2005), catch the urgent tenor of this epidemic media. If the scientific documentaries of the present implicitly position humans and microbes as mutually dependent partners within complex ecosystems, then the epidemic era documentaries are their epistemological other. Made precisely to redress the biopolitical devaluation of specific human congeries to disposable populations, the documentaries undertake Herculean efforts to restore social value to the human too easily reduced to a medical “case,” a nameless statistic. The dying is not of scientific interest for their cellular atrophy, but for the spiraling loss – personal, communal, national, even global – they bring in their wake. Irrevocable loss, irrevocable harm: the documentaries remind us there can no objective stance on “life itself ” from where all biological life appears in partnership. Many years and losses later, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker Alex Juhasz casts a reflexive look at the changing media fields of HIV/AIDS activist documentary. The essay is not a conventional history of activist documentary, but a personal reflection, a “showing” of ways we remember in context of new digital platforms. Speaking to the digital ACT UP Oral History project, which included 100 interviews from the New York community, Juhasz unpacks a hybrid documentary form of witnessing that involves cutting, pasting, and reassembling historical traces into present testimony. Juhasz’s performance underscores what we have learned from the virus after mapping of its genetic code: the cutting and pasting of its own informatic substrate, its DNA, so that it can replicate and multiply at great speeds. Here documentaries participate in the viral economies of information as the intervention – the best antidote to infection. The macabre politics of “making live and letting die” against which the HIV/ AIDS epidemic documentaries launched their audiovisual war surfaces as the central issue in the pandemic era. By 1989, in a famous conference, Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg catapulted the virus to the top of the list of dangers – the “greatest threat to humankind”! Popular journalistic accounts, such as Laurie Garrett’s The Coming

Introduction 277 Plague (1994) followed suit, publicizing the inevitable and possibly escalating emergence of tough viruses, already here but entering human populations with the constant upheavals in coevolving ecologies. After the antiretrovirals that turned our gaze inward to the cellular checks and balances of “living with HIV,” by the early 1990s the virus had become at once planetary and cellular. The spread of infection across the projected totality we name the global spurs a third scalar conjugation in pandemic-era documentaries. We know that HIV was globally resurgent as early as 1971, but it would take more than 25 years for its spread to be discursively constituted as a “pandemic” – a swiftly spreading epidemic uncontainable to localized territories such as towns, cities, or nation-states. A series of documentaries emerging across global regions now focused on epidemiological vectors, seeking to render a global topography of infection comprehensible for heterogeneous media publics. While it would be difficult to locate a single prevailing trend in these pandemic documentaries of the present, there is little doubt that the socially persuasive function of documentary practice is the driving force. Documentaries addressing transnational publics are now predominantly prophylactic: informing so as to prevent infection; targeting public policies and global agreements that stymie affordable access to retroviral therapies; and epidemiologically marking existing, but also probable, vectors of infection. In high crisis contexts, however, in which there are large infected and affected communities, documentaries take on the pedagogic agenda of conveying “positive living” with infection. Aside from these new burdens of public pedagogy, there is a striking shift in financing. Unlike the epidemic-era independent films and videos, these documentaries are multinational enterprises, co-funded by governments, NGOs, and global public health and media institutions. Thus they consistently reconfigure national contexts as part of a greater global public health story. If in India there is AIDS Jaago (Awaken to AIDS, 2007), four short docudramas (co-funded by the New York-based Mirabai Films and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) harnessing celebrity power against silent vectors of infection,8 in South Africa there are the 36 documentaries that make up the Steps for the Future enterprise (co-funded by the non-profit STEPS foundations in Denmark and South Africa) seeking to normalize living with HIV.9 The arenas of action are local, but the therapeutic and informational strategies the documentaries privilege as well-tried antidotes to infection are modular, globally transposable to multiple contexts. Rebecca Hodes’s contribution to this section addresses this last conjugation, representing global documentaries of the pandemic era. She takes us to a national arena where the mantra “silence equals death” played out in a surreal turn of events: to South Africa, a nation with one of the highest infection rates in the aftermath of President Thabo Mbeki’s denial of the link between HIV and AIDS, and to the question of antiretroviral efficacy. The Deputy Director of the AIDS and Society Research Unit at the University of Cape Town, Hodes situates us in this context in her cultural history of Siyayinqoba/Beat It!, a public television documentary program airing since 1999 that became one of the most powerful health education initiatives in contemporary history. Offering a reflective perspective on documentary as seminal to national biosecurity, Hodes shows how global documentaries are necessarily

278

Bishnupriya Ghosh

“indigenized” for situated impact; in her discussion, we gain a granular sense of the “global,” both transnational exchange and localized rearticulation. Together the three entries offer not only the history of documenting these microscopic invaders, but also a history of our virus zeitgeist. The contributors differ in their treatment of “theories” of infection in the documentaries, variously touching upon changing media technologies and infrastructures; on historiographic and theoretical models; as well as on the urgent political and ethical questions underlying the will to document the virus. The documentaries they assemble are also overwhelmingly heterogeneous in the capture, record, and analysis of unfolding human and microbial elations. The three conjugations attempt to organize this heterogeneity, the myriad relations between documentary practices and viral emergences, around historical contingencies (epistemological, ideological, or scalar) arising from the periodic threats that the virus has posed to human survival. The only “project” the documentaries share motivates the focus on contingency. For whatever their differences, all of the documentaries turn a critical gaze on what constitutes infection – the relays between cellular decay and ecological disequilibrium, illness and health, the pathological and the normal – as the galvanizing force behind the call to document. When read together, the essays present a case for documentary as quintessential to immediate or long-term intervention into states of infection, and especially when the biological agent is one that remains visually undetectable without technological mediation.

Notes 1 Melinda Cooper (2008) writes about the euphoria following the discovery of penicillin in 1945 that was dampened with the arrival of aggressive viruses in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 2 Dmitri Ivanovsky first described a non-bacterial pathogen infecting tobacco in 1892, a microbe subsequently named “virus” by the Dutch microbiologist and botanist, Martinus Beijerinck in 1898. The new name sought to differentiate agents that escaped the filters for bacteria, and appeared to thrive as contagious living fluids. 3 “Emergence” is a capacious term for a multilevel event across scales of action, human and non-human, that resists linear causality and is therefore difficult to predict. The term was first used in the ecological context by French-born American microbiologist, René Dubos, in his 1959 classic (Dubos, 1987). 4 There are many accounts of “first sightings,” some moving as far back as 1959 (cases now disproven by David Ho); the first US case was Robert R., who died in 1969. Usually, early cases are the pre-1981 cases (1981 is when AIDS became known to the medical profession). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_early_AIDS_cases, accessed July 28, 2014. 5 The origin of AIDS from a monkey was the most persistent human–animal contact myth, documented in critical accounts (see Turner, 1994; Wald, 2008) and popular figurations (the 1995 film Outbreak, ostensibly about Ebola). HIV was around for 100 years in ­Cameroon, for instance, until the butchering of bush meat enabled the transfer into human populations, in one account of zoonotic threats (see Whiteside, 2008).

Introduction 279 6 There is some debate about the facts (including identifying Gaetan Dugas as “patient zero”) that Shilts presents in his book. Shilts based his work on the “transmission scenario” compiled by Dr. William Darrow and colleagues at the US Centers for Disease Control. Four years later, Darrow repudiated his study. (I thank Rebecca Hodes for drawing my attention to the controversy.) 7 Popular journalism around the virus has played a key role in inciting documentary practice in both the epidemic (1980–1996) and pandemic eras: most famously, Laurie Garrett (1994), but also Nathan Wolfe (2011) and Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin (2012). 8 With a glittering cast, the shorts authored by four of India’s premier directors – Mira Nair’s Migration, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Blood Brothers, Santosh Sivan’s Prarambha (or The Beginning), and Farhan Akhtar’s Positive – were Nair’s brainchild, dramatic re-enactments of stories gathered from HIV/AIDS activists working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Delhi. 9 The 36 films range between 4 and 74 minutes in length, and include narrative stories, documentaries, music videos, experimental movies, and public service announcements. See http://www.stepsforthefuture.co.za/films.php, accessed July 28, 2014.

References Cooper, Melinda (2008) Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Dubos, René (1987) The Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change [1959]. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Garrett, Laurie (1994) The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. New York: Penguin. Shilts, Randy (1987) And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1980– 1985). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Timberg, Craig and Halperin, Daniel (2012) Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It. New York: Penguin. Turner, Patricia (1994) I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wald, Priscilla (2008) Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Whiteside, Alan (2008) HIV/AIDS: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolfe, Nathan (2011) The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age. New York: Times Books.

13

Animating Informatics Scientific Discovery Through Documentary Film Kirsten Ostherr

Someone would no doubt have ultimately observed it by following cells in the ordinary manner, for, after we had seen it in the motion pictures, we were able to follow it under the microscope. Warren H. Lewis (1931) From the earliest experiments with scientific cinematography to recent viral videos on the Internet, efforts to visualize unseen organisms have blended the documentary capacities of cinema with the medium’s ability to animate and simulate life. Films such as The Inner Life of the Cell (XVIVO, 2006) have captivated popular and scientific public imaginations at the level of molecular animation by simultaneously appealing to the indexical qualities of medical imaging and the enduring cinematic fantasy of visualizing the invisible through technologies of representation. A critical feature of such films is their explicit, self-conscious framing as data-driven visualizations; their creators emphasize the scientific process of image-production as central to the meaning of the finished product. By foregrounding their methods for converting information into narrative aesthetic forms, filmmakers working with molecular animation have merged the protocol of laboratory technique with that of documentary filmmaking. This is especially true in the case of cinematic representations of organisms that are invisible to the naked eye; by depicting the microscopic world, scientific films have enabled researchers and the fascinated public to see – and believe in – previously unimaginable new worlds. At the same time, the futuristic optimism of these new visualizations masks an underlying anxiety linked to the world of viral activity. Microscopic images of HIV, Ebola, and other emerging

A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



Animating Informatics

281

infectious diseases lend a dramatic urgency to our efforts to document and understand the microbiomes that surround us. This chapter will examine recent computer-generated animations in relation to the history of cinemicroscopy, emphasizing the function of scientific data in the production of documentary realism. Beginning with an exploration of how early scientists used the cinematograph as a laboratory tool, the chapter will then move into a discussion of how scientific films of the late 1920s intersected with the burgeoning documentary movement of that era. This rich historical setting provides a launching point for considering the place of science film in the field of documentary film studies, both at an early formative moment and in the contemporary context of digital imaging. Grounding the discussion in case studies of two exemplary films, Development of the Fertilized Rabbit Ovum (1929) and The Inner Life of the Cell (2006), this chapter will explain how the visual representation of cellular life has been a critical site of intersection for science and film since the early twentieth century. Shifting to focus on the processes by which hard data in the life sciences are now converted into animated images in computers, the chapter will then analyze how these “informatic” images make powerful documentary claims despite their profound mediation by software that makes pictures out of numbers. I will argue that the resulting “images of objectivity” (Daston and Galison, 2007) are shaped by  narrative and aesthetic strategies that have, in turn, shaped the relationships ­between science, documentary, and animation from the origins of cinema to the present day. By describing the images in these scientific films as “informatic,” I mean to call attention to the process of image production as a movement from data collection to visualization throughout the history of scientific renderings of the “invisible” world. The working definition of “bioinformatics” at the US National Institutes of Health explicitly recognizes the production of visual images as an element in this new field of scientific practice: Research, development, or application of computational tools and approaches for expanding the use of biological, medical, behavioral or health data, including those to acquire, store, organize, archive, analyze, or visualize such data. (Huerta et al., 2000; emphasis added)

One recent overview of medical informatics describes the purpose of the field as “the systematic processing of data, information and knowledge in medicine and health care” (Haux, 2010: 600). An alternate definition concisely highlights the new forms of knowledge enabled by these practices: “Bioinformatics derives knowledge from computer analysis of biological data” (Nilges and Linge, 2012). For our purposes within documentary studies, a synthesis might characterize “informatic imaging” as the visualization of computer data to produce new forms of biomedical knowledge. These visualizations claim to document an unseen reality, and in doing so, they bring that very reality into being. Looking back to the pre-computational era, we will consider animation as fulfilling the informatic function in documentary

282

Kirsten Ostherr

science films. In a recent analysis of the relations between science and documentary, Joshua Malitsky has argued: From their inception, documentary films and science films have incorporated animation; indeed, we might say that the first photographic moving images are best understood as animations, as indicated by the frequent epithet for early cinema, “animated photography.” (Malitsky, 2012: 17)

A core premise of this study is that early science films animated cells, just as computers now animate data, and all of these practices can productively expand our understanding of documentary film.

The Cinematograph as Scientific Instrument To understand the status of contemporary scientific visualizations in relation to debates about documentary film, we must begin by considering the historical role of cinema in scientific research. The story usually begins with the work of French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey, whose experiments using chronophotography to study human and animal movement in the 1880s are seen as a precursor to the technological development of the cinematic apparatus, as well as an early attempt to develop a time-based medium for recording scientific experiments (Braun, 1992; Cartwright, 1995). While scholars have appropriately challenged the idea of attributing the invention of cinema to a single scientist, Marey’s work is nonetheless emblematic for his methodical approach to developing a new tool for data collection that expanded the indexical capacities of photography by increasing the speed of image capture (Tosi, 2005). Crucial to Marey’s contribution is the fact that the chronophotographs did not merely produce new data about locomotion. Far more important than the numerical results accrued was the fact that Marey’s method of visualizing the data was inseparable from the data itself. As another early innovator, Jean Painlevé, put it, “It never would have occurred to  the pioneers of cinema to dissociate research on film from research by means of  film” (Painlevé, 2000: 162). Hannah Landecker opens her influential essay, “Microcinematography and the History of Science and Film” (2006) with this quote from Painlevé to explore how techniques for filming cellular movement radically transformed not just cinema but many scientific fields, including biology, in the early twentieth century. Emphasizing “the importance of moving from a static to a dynamic medium in the study of life,” Landecker shows how scientists such as Julius Ries were trained in Marey’s chronophotographic technique, and then went on to explore new possibilities through the cinematograph. Indeed, Ries’s 1907 film, Fertilization and Development of the Sea Urchin Egg was among the first to truly capture images of living, moving cells in a format that could be projected (as opposed to being presented as a series of still images) to teach cell theory to medical students (Landecker, 2009: 708). Expanding on Marey’s own innovation, Ries created the first



Animating Informatics

283

time-lapse films of cell development by condensing a 14-hour process into a twominute film and thereby making visible the otherwise invisible – because imperceptibly slow – process of embryogenesis. The marriage of microcinematography and studies of cellular movement in Ries’s work thus forms a critical nexus for considering scientific uses of film as applied documentary technique. In the same period, the French scientist Jean Comandon was sponsored by the commercial film company Pathé Frères to make microcinematographs that he would use for research purposes while they were also distributed through the Pathé catalogue to audiences of students and the general public (Landecker, 2006: 125, 128). Here, the question of where to draw a boundary between scientific research films and documentary films becomes complex; while the work of Marey and Ries can be seen as clearly engaged in producing a scientific inscription of the real through a cinematic (or proto-cinematic) recording device, their work was made by and for the scientific community, not for consumption by the general public or cineastes. As we will discuss shortly, the reception context has played a vital role in defining documentary films, alongside photographic technique, aesthetics, and narrative structure. Significantly, Landecker has shown that these same elements were also explicitly in play in discussions of Comandon’s films in the early twentieth century: The cellular film, an infinitely reproducible inscription of a continuous living movement rather than a set of histological stills, was a new form of narrative as well as a new set of aesthetic forms for both scientist and layman. From the beginning, Comandon’s films, in particular their combinations of magnification and acceleration, raised questions about narrative and meaning not just for film critics but for the scientific investigation of the relationship of structural elements and functional events in the microscopic world. (Landecker, 2005)

As films that were shown in a wide variety of public settings, Comandon’s experiments seemed to capture the public imagination at the same time that they provided foundational instruction for students of medicine and biology. In all of these settings, to varying degrees, Comandon’s films merged the fascination of the invisible real with the pleasure of cinematic spectatorship. Moreover, for all of these viewers, Comandon’s films – and science films in general – advanced new theories for understanding the fundamental elements of life itself. Where in this network of meanings does documentary film fit?

The Scientific Process of Social Persuasion Bill Nichols has influentially argued that four elements had to come together for a documentary film movement to emerge in the 1920s and early 1930s: “documentary took identifiable shape when photographic realism, narrative structure, and modernist fragmentation served the goal of social persuasion” (Nichols, 2001: 596). In

284

Kirsten Ostherr

making this claim, Nichols notes that all of these elements already existed prior to their convergence, performing different functions outside the field of documentary. For instance, in his discussion of photographic realism, Nichols observes: Like scientific documentation, the “cinema of attractions” … relies on the authenticating effect of camera optics and photographic emulsions to generate images that bear a precise set of relations to that which they represent. Both scientific evidence and carnival-like attractions exhibit noteworthy aspects of the world with indexical precision. Such images readily serve as documents, but not documentaries. In science, they offer proofs or record phenomena beyond what the eye can see. As “attractions,” they solicit “spectator attention,” inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle – a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself. (2001: 586–587)

By distinguishing between documents and documentary here, Nichols implicitly argues that science films do not fit within the category of documentary despite the “indexical precision” with which they represent the world. While the categorization of science films is not the main point of Nichols’s essay, this distinction nonetheless has the surprising effect of accepting the self-presentation of many science films as objective products of sterile laboratory environments that can be taken at face value as evidence of “truth.” Instead, our examples will show that many (if not all) scientist filmmakers explicitly recognize the experimental nature of their filmed data, cautiously interpreting their results as probabilistic, not certain. To qualify as a documentary film, Nichols argues that photographic realism, narrative structure, and modernist fragmentation must work together toward the purpose of social persuasion – a goal that might seem antithetical to the scientific method. But science has always utilized the very representational techniques that it rhetorically disdains. As Nichols notes, “Spectacle in early cinema, like visual evidence in science, relied on an impression of photographic realism the better to convince us of the authenticity of remarkable sights” (2001: 589). But it is important to recognize that the scientific documents themselves have served a similar purpose of persuasion in the sense that they enacted scientific processes, which then established scientific truths. In other words, the ability to produce a film of a scientific “fact” has often been integral to the very establishment of that fact as fact. Thus, the rhetorical function so important to Nichols’s formulation of the four key elements that established the documentary film movement in the 1920s and 1930s also played a key role in the seemingly pure use of science film in the laboratory. Nichols is well aware that science films also engage in persuasion, but he maintains a distinction between scientific evidence and documentary film through reference to the role of emotion in documentary – another mode of expression presumed absent in the science film and its spectator. Nichols argues: Documents have long been regarded as factual elements of the historical record, free of the editorializing stratagems of the orator or the interpretative leanings of the historian.



Animating Informatics

285

Documentaries, on the other hand, are the product of a persuasive, or at least poetic, intent to have an audience see and act differently. … The rhetorical tradition, of which the documentary film tradition is a specific manifestation, has always granted great importance to feeling or emotion as the course of action. The poststructural fillip that documents are themselves rhetorical constructs designed to bear greater evidentiary weight in an overall argument by dint of their apparent objectivity does not diminish the signal importance of emotion coupled to a persuasive intent that gives rhetoric, and documentary film, its social significance. (2001: 587 n. 13)

This refinement of the criteria for excluding science films – that they are not intended to provoke “emotion coupled to a persuasive intent” – poses a useful challenge to our exemplary cases. Indeed, Nichols’s formulation provides an illuminating analytical framework for this chapter’s claim that cellular and molecular animations merge the scientific and “cinema of attractions” functions of photographic realism. Moreover, as my analysis of some early examples of cellular imaging alongside The Inner Life of the Cell will show, these films are also shaped to a surprising degree by both narrative structure and modernist fragmentation. The key remaining criteria concern the role of emotion and the intent of social persuasion, as well as the historical specificity of early science films in relation to the history of documentary films. While the answers to these questions will be illuminating on their own, it is also worth considering why it matters whether we think of science films as documentary films in the first place. What might be gained or lost in this linkage? How might the critical frameworks for analyzing documentary and science film be mutually productive, or revealing in new ways?

Microscopic Ways of Seeing As demonstrated by the brief history of scientific cinematography outlined above, motion pictures of cellular movement were made from at least 1907 onward. In this early stage of the field, scientists had to rig up their own contraptions, and this need for self-engineering probably posed a barrier to widespread adoption. However, the moving picture camera became an indispensable piece of laboratory equipment once a prefabricated apparatus for microcinematography became commercially available in Europe, starting in 1914 (Landecker, 2009: 708). Among the expanding ranks of scientific filmmakers from the 1910s onward was Warren H. Lewis, a Johns Hopkins MD and anatomist whose work in embryology and tissue culture revolutionized those fields (Corner, 1967). Like Ries, Comandon, and Painlevé, Lewis explicitly credited motion pictures with revealing processes that he might never have detected by sitting and patiently observing cells in real time through the microscope. The combination of time-lapse cinematography and repeat viewing of recorded microscopic observations led Lewis to a major discovery in 1931 of a type of cell activity he called “pinocytosis” (drinking by cells), and to new theories about cell locomotion as well (Corner, 1967: 339–340; Lewis, 1931).

286

Kirsten Ostherr

Lewis’s earliest publication on motion picture experimentation (Lewis and Gregory, 1929) recounted the production process and discoveries resulting from a film he made and would later distribute through the Eastman Medical Films catalogue, under the title Development of the Fertilized Rabbit Ovum (Ostherr, 2012a, 2012b). This film and others including Cultures of Normal and Cancer Cells (1932), Cleavage, 2 to 8 Cells, Monkey (Macacus Rhesus) Egg (1934), Pinocytosis: Drinking by Cells (1936), Growth of Capillaries and Endothelium from Subcutaneous Tissue (1936), Normal and Abnormal White Blood Cells in Tissue Cultures (1939), and Dividing Normal Adult Rat Fibroblasts in Tissue Cultures (1939) circulated widely and served as definitive teaching films for many years.1 Lewis’s biographer recounts that his films “won keen attention and admiration” whenever he exhibited them, and were in such high demand that Lewis had to set up his own film distribution system, operating out of his office at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Embryology in Baltimore. Widely used as teaching films, Lewis’s microcinematographs provided powerful visualizations that led a new generation of scientists to see the invisible world through radically different eyes. In his biographer’s words: To thousands of students of zoology, embryology, and histology all over the world, [Lewis’s films] have given a vivid impression of the structure of living normal and malignant cells of the blood and connective tissues, of cell division, phagocytosis, pinocytosis, the locomotion of leucocytes and macrophages, and the earliest stages of mammalian development. (Corner, 1967: 341)

For passionate young scientists, witnessing these cornerstones of biological activity in lifelike motion for the first time could easily become a transformative event. As Lewis and other scientist filmmakers discussed the power of motion pictures as research and teaching tools, they highlighted their ability to convincingly demonstrate processes that had previously been theorized (without the support of time-based evidence), as well as their seeming capacity to effect instant paradigm shifts. Could this process be akin to Nichols’s “emotion coupled to a persuasive intent”? Admittedly, the 1929 film itself is far from emotional. Viewers are introduced to this incredible new world with dispassionate notifications of the precise temporal and spatial manipulations that enabled the film to be created: “The action in this picture is 360 times faster than normal. (1 minute of projection equals 6 hours of growth.)” Frequent reference to measurement ensures that the introduction of this new experimental technique will not undermine the rigorous research protocol: “Unfertilized ovum (diameter 0.1 mm) in follicular tissue 10 hours after copulation.” A chronometer in the upper left corner of the frame provides an index of time passing as time-lapse cell division occurs on screen. Intertitles regularly reorient viewers as the cinematic time of the film is collapsed: “Fertilized ovum. First cleavage occurs 22 hours after copulation,” and later, “Second cleavage at 24 ½ hours.” In this depiction of the development of the fertilized rabbit ovum, photographic realism is abundantly on display. But what



Animating Informatics

287

Figure 13.1 and Figure 13.2  Development of the Fertilized Rabbit Ovum (Warren H. Lewis, 1929, distributed through the Eastman Medical Films catalogue).

of narrative structure and modernist fragmentation? While the film does not focus on a well-developed human character, I would submit that the “rabbit-egg” that seems to magically divide onscreen as it begins the process of transformation from microscopic life form to baby bunny, captures the imagination of scientist and general public viewers alike precisely because of its narrative characteristics as it contributes to the story of life, a scientific version of “where babies come from.” At the same time that the “development” depicted here follows a linear storyline, however, Lewis’s film also displays many of the Modernist qualities of his avant-garde contemporaries, including such luminaries as Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Dziga Vertov, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, and others (Nichols, 2001). Despite efforts to ground the details of the experiment in recognizable terms through reference to temporal and spatial measurements, the visual scene is a fragmentation and abstraction of reality. For non-scientists, images of cellular movement were not commonplace in the late

288

Kirsten Ostherr

1920s, and even scientists with experience at the microscope were seeing time-lapse images of mammalian development for the first time in Lewis’s film. Moreover, the foregrounding of representational technique through intertitles that announced the film’s manipulation of space and time could be accurately described as a “rejection of the transparency of realist representation” (Nichols, 2001: 593). Perhaps intending to prove the typicality of the cell division depicted in this film, viewers are introduced to “A similar specimen,” that repeats the first and second cleavages in a few seconds of screen time. Much like the disorienting Life of an American Fireman (Edwin S. Porter, 1903), that extends the duration of story time by re-presenting the events of the narrative from a new point of view (inside the burning house instead of outside, with the firemen), Development of the Fertilized Rabbit Ovum defamiliarizes the narrative process through temporal and spatial discontinuity even as it defines a foundational sequence of embryogenesis. The film continues in this manner until the blastula herniates; at the conclusion of this process, a conventional cinematic signal informs viewers that the experiment has terminated. A title card announces that the story is over, as if this were a fiction film, by stating, “The End.” While the intertitles do not reveal the excitement generated by these moving images, the published narration of the production process offers a more nuanced interpretation, exposing to readers all of the uncertainty that characterizes groundbreaking experiments. As published in Science, “Cinematographs of Living Developing Rabbit-Eggs” begins as the film does, by describing the research protocol in painstaking detail, identifying the precise degree of magnification on the film (44 diameters) and the rate of exposure for producing the time-lapse cinematograph (two and one half per minute). The piece moves into a discussion of how Lewis prepared his slide mounts, keeping the fertilized eggs warm during filming so he could capture the process of embryogenesis. Lewis notes more than once the role of the cinematograph in both enabling and distorting the experiment; due to the complexity of preparing the mounts for filming, the eggs were kept at room temperature for up to one hour, “hence their development was probably somewhat delayed” (Lewis and Gregory, 1929: 227). The scientist’s uncertainty about the meaning of his observations demonstrates the process of discovery facilitated by the film’s rendering of the previously unseen world of cell division: “The cells … seem to undergo peculiar pulsations or changes in size” (227). By explicitly acknowledging that the cinematograph “seems” to reveal a “peculiar” new truth, Lewis subjects the new tool of measurement to the same methodologies of hypothesis testing as all of the elements in his experiments. At the same time, however, Lewis readily credits the camera with enhancing his capacity for observation, saying, “The expansions and contractions were revealed by the cinematograph. Such variations would hardly have been discovered as readily by any other method” (228). Based on his new perceptual capacities, Lewis speculates about the meaning of the movements he had never been able to witness before: “Both films showed what appeared to be the ameboid cells, probably endodermal cells migrating about on the inner surface of the thin trophoblast” (228). Lewis’s curiosity about these observations would lead to the discovery of pinocytosis through subsequent films of cellular movement.



Animating Informatics

289

The conclusion to “Cinematographs of Living Developing Rabbit-Eggs” is revealing. Instead of summarizing the results of the experiment in terms of new information about embryogenesis, Lewis focuses exclusively on the results of using the cinematograph as a laboratory tool: The great advantage of the combination of the progressive development of the early stages of the living egg and the cinematographic record of the same over any other method is obvious. One has on the film a permanent record that can be examined repeatedly. (Lewis and Gregory, 1929: 228–229)

Indeed, from this conclusion, readers can see that the experiment is actually on “cinematographs,” not on “rabbit-eggs.” The eggs provided evidence about the cinematograph, not the other way around. Or perhaps more accurately, the eggs became inseparable from the cinematograph, so that any new discovery about the development of the fertilized rabbit ovum was also a discovery about cinematography, and together, these new visualizations created a new set of facts, and a new way of seeing. Development of the Fertilized Rabbit Ovum was distributed widely, generating excitement among scientific and general audiences; it was even exhibited at the Hall of Science at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago (Landecker, 2004: 136). The acclaim and publicity that met Lewis’s subsequent discovery of pinocytosis through film study further exemplifies how the cinematograph brought a new world into being for scientists as much as it did for the modernist avant-garde and documentary filmmakers of this era.

Molecular Animation Shifting from the analog depiction of cellular processes in the late 1920s to the digital renderings of The Inner Life of the Cell (2006) allows us to explore the relationship between science and spectacle by questioning the significance of the digital turn and the role that computers have played in transforming our conceptions of documentary evidence. Recent scholarly work has framed new bioinformatic modes of representation as retaining an indexical trace, albeit through increasing levels of data manipulation. For instance, Catherine Waldby has characterized the shifting techniques of visualization as they impact bodies and the images they generate: Since the early 1970s new computerized techniques for imaging the body’s interior had been gradually replacing or supplementing the traditional radiograph, a photographic technology. These techniques involve the digitalization of forms of radiation passed through or emitted by the body, and then the rendering of this digital data as a visual representation of the body on the computer screen. (Waldby, 2000: 9)

Mark J.P. Wolf expands on Waldby’s point about the multiple layers of rendering in computed imaging, arguing that this technique of visualization “is often indexically

290

Kirsten Ostherr

less direct than film-based photography, due to the active mediation of hardware and software, as well as the storage of the image as a signal instead of a fixed record” (Wolf, 1999: 276). Importantly, however, Wolf also notes that the status of indexicality itself – long a core feature of documentary film – is in flux: In this era of computer simulation, there is a greater willingness to trade close indexical linkage for new knowledge that would otherwise be unattainable within the stricter requirements of indexical linkage that were once needed to validate knowledge empirically. Many of these requirements have to do with observation, the visual verification of one’s data. (1999: 274)

While Warren Lewis’s films of cellular motion provided both the visual verification (through filmed measurements) and the data (the quantitative results of those indexical traces), The Inner Life of the Cell provides a data-based imagination of what scientists might see if a representational technology existed that could capture an indexical rendering at the molecular scale of movement. Derived from the best evidence available so far, the new films leap into the unknown, reframing principles of documentation in the process. How, then, is a computer-generated animation like a documentary film? And what might be gained from the comparison? The Inner Life of the Cell is an eightminute computer-generated animation produced by XVIVO and commissioned by BioVisions, a multimedia collaboration based in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at Harvard University and funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The film depicts “the process of leukocyte extravasation, the movement of leukocytes, white blood cells that defend the body against disease, toward the site of tissue damage or infection, while touring major parts of the cell.”2 BioVisions Director Dr. Robert A. Lue describes the context for the animation in terms that conjure Warren H. Lewis’s experimental filmmaking practices: Research in the biological sciences often depends on the development of new ways of visualizing important processes and molecules. Indeed, the very act of observing and recording data lies at the foundation of all the natural sciences. The same holds true for the teaching and communication of scientific ideas; to see is to begin to understand. (Lue, 2007)

From this perspective, because the production of The Inner Life of the Cell is based on known data, the resulting visualization can form the basis for subsequent observation and understanding. The core data thus produce what Mark J.P. Wolf has called “subjunctive documentary,” highlighting the ways that computer simulations offer access to a conceptual, rather than perceptual “real” (Wolf, 1999: 286). The complex dynamics of data-driven creative visualization were in the foreground of The Inner Life of the Cell from its inception. John Liebler, XVIVO lead animator on the project, described a key challenge as the team’s desire to “give the



Animating Informatics

291

final animation the kind of dramatic heft you might find in a longer project with more stirring plot lines” (Marchant, 2006). To achieve this goal, Liebler recounts: What we did in some cases, with the full support of the Harvard team, was subtly change the way things work. The reality is that all that stuff that’s going on in each cell is so tightly packed together that if we were to put every detail into every shot, you wouldn’t be able to see the forest for the trees or know what you were even looking at. One of the most common things we did, then, was to strip it apart and add space where there isn’t really that much space. (Marchant, 2006)

Following in the tradition of renowned medical illustrator Frank Netter, the XVIVO team selectively highlighted the essential elements of the intercellular space, so that viewers could focus on the critical components of the scene and ignore the messy details that would be included in a truly photorealistic rendering of the cell. At the same time, however, the film was based entirely on “data and narrative” provided by the team of Harvard scientists, and thus offers a form of informatic indexicality to the image, a computed version of photographic indexicality. Importantly, the verisimilitude of the informatic image is enhanced by the narrative structure of the film: the fact that this is not a photographic rendering of leukocyte extravasation (a technically impossible feat at this point in time) is far less significant than the fact that The Inner Life of the Cell seems to bring the viewer inside of a three-dimensional world to witness the white blood cell’s performance as the story of infection unfolds through space and time. But to see the story space clearly, the animators had to take creative license. David Bolinsky, XVIVO medical director, further describes this process: We had to figure out how to take a cell that is so packed with molecules and to edit out visually about 90 to 95 percent of those molecules and still keep in all the kinds of structure that would indicate to the student what’s going on. (Bolinsky quoted in Zetter, 2007)

In a science film, this editorial intervention might seem to require justification; however, the standard instructional models for depicting this process include even less visual detail than the animation. In fact, just as Development of the Fertilized Rabbit Ovum (and other cinemicrographs) overturned the reductive but dominant view of cell division as a discrete series of fixed stages based on histological slides, The Inner Life of the Cell disrupted the flat, static, diagrammatic view of white blood cell activity typically presented in biology textbooks, offering a radical new way of seeing the highly mobile world inside of the cell. As an aesthetic visualization of a “bioscape” that can serve as the setting for further scientific experimentation, The Inner Life of the Cell might be productively considered as a form of “biomedia.” Eugene Thacker has argued (along with N. Katherine Hayles and others) that late twentieth-century advances in computer and information technologies have led to the integration of biology and informatics, and

292

Kirsten Ostherr

consequently, biology can be treated as a technology at the molecular and genetic levels, and biological life itself can be treated as a medium (Thacker, 2010: 122). We have seen how the cinematograph became a core technology for Warren Lewis and other early scientist-filmmakers; here, molecular animation is a technology that aptly performs Thacker’s claim that biomedia entail the informatic recontextualization of biological components and processes, for ends that may be medical or nonmedical (economic, technical), and with effects that are as much cultural, social and political as they are scientific. Biomedia ask us to consider media things as inseparable from acts of mediation. “Life itself ” becomes both medium and process of mediation. (Thacker, 2010: 123)

The concept of biomedia can help illuminate how the functions of documentary filmmaking mobilize the rhetorical techniques embedded within scientific visualizations. Extending Thacker’s “biomedia” through Robert Mitchell’s discussion of “bioart,” we find that Nichols’s “emotion coupled to persuasive intent” readily characterizes the varied means of merging the biological with the world of narrative aesthetics. In Mitchell’s analysis, bioart brings together two different senses of the term “medium”: as material means for storage, transmission, and communication; and as biological substrates that keep cells living, developing, and dividing (Mitchell, 2010: 11). As Lewis noted back in 1929, one of the most important scientific contributions of the cinematograph was the medium’s preservation of “a permanent record that can be examined repeatedly” (Lewis and Gregory, 1929: 228–229). Exemplifying André Bazin’s “change mummified,” Lewis’s films stored the experimental data, transmitted it to students, and in so doing, extended the lives of the cells in perpetuity (many of these cells can still be seen dividing on the Internet).3 Indeed, the impact and persuasiveness of biological visualizations across media lies precisely in their insistence upon the indexical link to “life itself,” which binds the documentary aspect of these representations to their scientific and ontological function. The Inner Life of the Cell does not merely visualize a molecular process occurring within cells, it dramatizes the human body’s fight against infection and invasion by foreign enemies – an update to the classic medical metaphor of disease as war (Martin, 1995; Sontag, 1988). This rendering occurs in a science fiction “microscape” whose spectacular ­aesthetics are underscored in the three-minute music video version of the film. Unlike the longer eight-minute version of the film with its informative but dry, technical voice-over narration, with superimposed labels identifying parts of the cell, and background silence, the music video that went viral in 2006 features no didactic explanation whatsoever, and instead offers an emotional piano ­accompaniment that slowly builds to a dramatic punctuation at the precise moment that the “membrane-bound vesicle driven by motor proteins” (the starring character “out for a stroll”) makes its memorable screen debut. At this moment, the abstraction of the film is condensed onto a figure that viewers are



Animating Informatics

293

Figure 13.3  The Inner Life of the Cell (XVIVO, 2006, commissioned by BioVisions, a multimedia collaboration based in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at Harvard University and funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute).

invited to identify as the “hero” of the story: the vesicle that helps propel the white blood cell to the site of infection. The uncanny anthropomorphism of the vesicle, with its stick-figure arms carrying the organelle, its elongated body, and two motor protein “legs” walking along the microtubule, elicited amazement and disbelief when the film was released.4 Yet, as animator John Liebler has noted, “When I started working on that section I admit I was kind of surprised to see that it really does look like it’s out for a stroll, like a character in a science fiction film or animation. But based on all the data, it’s a completely accurate rendering” (Marchant, 2006). The appearance of a humanoid figure within this molecular biome has profound implications for the importance of seeing science film as part of the documentary tradition.

Conclusion As the preeminent form of bodily visualization in the bioinformatic era, medical imaging makes great promises: to reveal the core of human subjectivity (via fMRI brain scans), the intricate details of embryogenesis (via optical imaging of live biological samples), the earliest signs of encroaching illnesses (via PET, ultrasound, etc.), and more. Medical imaging as a mode of documenting the human body has “gone viral” through a process of contagion that illustrates the production of imaginary geographies through technologies of representation. In this process, real-world proximity to an imaging center leads to an increased use of imaging (much as proximity to a source of infection leads to viral contagion), even in the

294

Kirsten Ostherr

absence of evidence to support its use. This process of contagion has, in turn, led to viral replication by fostering the establishment of increasing numbers of imaging centers at hospitals, universities, and non-clinical locations such as shopping malls across the United States (Hendee et al., 2010; Sloane and Sloane, 2003). As the scientific qualities attributed to the clinical production of body images are equated with the benefits of imaging, visualization becomes conflated with both diagnosis and treatment. Everything that can possibly be imaged is imaged, with serious consequences for medical practice as well as public imaginaries concerned with the limits of bodily transformation, the attainability of health, and the avoidability of death (Gawande, 2010). While medical imaging, visualization, and informatics have become increasingly central to biomedical research over the past several decades, little research exists that integrates analysis of the aesthetic qualities of these developments with consideration of the impact of these changes on human experience, the doctor– patient relationship, health outcomes, or overall population wellness. This chapter has attempted to address this gap by focusing on documentary representations of life forms that are invisible to the naked eye. What impact do scientific visualizations of biological information have on patient expectations and outcomes? What is the role of documentary media in shaping debates over the power and limits of informatic medicine? What is the social significance of micro- and molecularscale cellular imaging? What is the effect of informatic imaging on documentary writ large? Like Warren Lewis’s films, The Inner Life of the Cell posits that a complex and beautiful living world exists beyond the scale of human perception. Representational technologies like the cinematograph and computer animation can aid in the process of scientific discovery by enabling observation of previously invisible organisms and processes, thereby opening up new fields of research. Once the cellular and molecular scales of life begin to be “documented” in this way, these representations take on the status of evidence; the centrality of the indexical trace to the history of scientific cinematography thus plays a crucial role in enabling computer simulations to function as bioinformatic media that might be seen as constituting “life itself.” By positing an aesthetically rendered, anthropomorphic, and narrative-based microscopic world as “real,” such films attach high-tech scientific data to emotional understandings of the self. The imagery of The Inner Life of the Cell becomes a rendering of the “inner life of the self,” encouraging viewers (budding scientists and the general public alike) to identify with the depicted processes and thereby implicitly endorsing the broader research program of which these images form a part. Nikolas Rose has influentially described the new molecular biopolitics of the life sciences as tied to the belief that in most, maybe all cases, if not now then in the future, the risky, damaged, defective, or afflicted individual, once identified and assessed, may be treated or transformed by medical intervention at the molecular level. (Rose, 2007: 254)



Animating Informatics

295

Noting that these developments can have both positive and negative life-altering effects, Rose suggests that the contemporary form of “‘biological reductionism’ should not be a cause for critique but the grounds for a certain optimism” (2007: 255). It is in this spirit that I conclude with a call for consideration of scientific visualizations – from the microcinematography of the 1920s to the computer-generated molecular animations of the present – as vital elements in the theory and practice of documentary. Indeed, Rose has argued a variant of this case in claiming, “In part it is by means of new technologies of visualization that life has been made amenable to thought at the molecular level, as a set of intelligible vital mechanisms among molecular entities” (2007: 14). Bill Nichols’s compelling analysis of the historical confluence of factors that led to the emergence of the documentary film movement in the 1920s and 1930s, with its modernist fragmentation, narrative storytelling, and photographic realism, have provided a frame for assessing whether the visual representations under discussion here might fit within the category of “documentary.” Taking heed of the historicity of Nichols’s claims, I would suggest that molecular animations should be analyzed in relation to the shifting status of evidence, realism, and indexicality in contemporary documentary films that foreground their own mediation of “facts” through techniques such as re-enactment, repurposing of found footage, and animation.5 In this context, informatic indexicality sheds its problematic evidentiary status and instead becomes an exemplary case for the vitality of documentary in the digital age. By analyzing informatic images of biological life with the tools of documentary film studies, these scientific renderings of “reality” get pulled from their protected space in the laboratory and subjected to social criticism. In the process, they lose their privileged status as objective or neutral representations, and enter the realm of “emotion coupled to persuasive intent.” By viewing scientific images as powerful rhetorical expressions that participate in the techniques and goals of the documentary tradition, we may begin to mobilize their persuasive power to enable a fuller understanding of the biopolitics of molecular life itself.

Notes 1 Many of these films are held at the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, and are available for viewing online at http://www.­youtube. com/user/MedicalArchives. 2 The video can be viewed at http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/innerlifeseries.html, ­accessed July 29, 2014. 3 The phrase “change mummified” comes from André Bazin (1960). See also Philip Rosen (2001). 4 See, e.g., the user’s guide to The Inner Life of the Cell at http://sparkleberrysprings.com/ innerlifeofcell.html, accessed July 29, 2014. 5 Examples include The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988), Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (Craig Baldwin, 1992), and Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008). See Arthur (1993) and Malitsky (2012).

296

Kirsten Ostherr

References Arthur, P. (1993) Jargons of Authenticity: Three American Moments. In Renov, M. (ed.) Theorizing Documentary, pp. 108–134. New York: Routledge. Bazin, A. (1960) The Ontology of the Photographic Image. Film Quarterly, 13(4), 4–9. Braun, M. (1992) Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cartwright, L. (1995) Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Corner, G.W. (1967) Warren Harmon Lewis, 1870–1964: A Biographical Memoir. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences. Daston, L. and Galison, P. (2007) Objectivity. New York: Zone. Gawande, A. (2010) Letting Go: What Should Medicine Do When It Can’t Save Your Life? The New Yorker, August 2. Haux, R. (2010) Medical Informatics: Past, Present, Future. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 79, 599–610. Hendee, W.R. et al. (2010) Addressing Overutilization in Medical Imaging. Radiology, 257(1), 240–245. Huerta, M. et al. (2000) NIH Working Definition of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, www.bisti.nih.gov/docs/CompuBioDef.pdf, accessed July 29, 2014. Landecker, H. (2004) The Lewis Films: Tissue Culture and “Living Anatomy,” 1919–1940. In Maienschein, J., Glitz, M., and Allan, G. (eds.) Centennial History of the Carnegie Institute, vol. 5, Department of Embryology, pp. 117–144. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Landecker, H. (2005) Cellular Features: Microcinematography and Film Theory. Critical Inquiry, 31, 903–937. Landecker, H. (2006) Microcinematography and the History of Science and Film. Isis, 97, 121–132. Landecker, H. (2009) Seeing Things: From Microcinematography to Live Cell Imaging. Nature Methods, 6(10), 707–709. Lewis, W.H. (1931) Pinocytosis. Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, 49, 17–26. Lewis, W.H. and Gregory, P.W. (1929) Cinematographs of Living Developing Rabbit-Eggs. Science, 69(1782), 226–229. Lue, R.A. (2007) BioVisions at Harvard University, http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/, accessed July 29, 2014. Malitsky, J. (2012) Science and Documentary: Unity, Indexicality, Reality. Journal of Visual Culture, 11(3), 237–257. Marchant, B. (2006) Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell. Studiodaily, July 20, http://www. studiodaily.com/main/technique/tprojects/6850.html, accessed July 29, 2014. Martin, E. (1995) Flexible Bodies: The Role of Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press. Mitchell, R. (2010) Bioart and the Vitality of Media. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Nichols, B. (2001) Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde. Critical Inquiry, 27(4), 580–610. Nilges, M. and Linge, J.P. (2012) Bioinformatics. Institut Pasteur, http://www.pasteur.fr/ recherche/unites/Binfs/definition/bioinformatics_definition.html, accessed July 29, 2014. Ostherr, K. (2012a) Medical Education Through Film: Animating Anatomy at the American College of Surgeons and Eastman Kodak. In Streible, D., Orgeron, D., and Orgeron, M.



Animating Informatics

297

(eds.) Learning with the Lights Off: A Reader in Educational Film, pp. 168–192. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ostherr, K. (2012b) Operative Bodies: Live Action and Animation in Medical Films of the 1920s. Journal of Visual Culture, 11(3), 352–377. Painlevé, J. (2000) Scientific Film [1955]. In Masaki Bellows, A. and McDougall, M. (eds.) Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, trans. Jeanine Herman, pp. 160–169. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rose, N. (2007) The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the TwentyFirst Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rosen, P. (2001) Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sloane, D.C. and Conant Sloane, B. (2003) Medicine Moves to the Mall. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sontag, S. (1988) Illness As Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Thacker, E. (2010) Biomedia. In Mitchell, W.J.T. and Hansen, M.B.N. (eds.) Critical Terms for Media Studies, pp. 117–130. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tosi, V. (2005) Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography, trans. Sergio Angelini. London: British Universities Film and Video Council. Waldby, C. (2000) The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. New York: Routledge. Wolf, M.J.P. (1999) Subjunctive Documentary: Computer Imaging and Simulation. In Gaines, J.M. and Renov, M. (eds.) Collecting Visible Evidence, pp. 274–291. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Zetter, K. (2007) Lives of a Cell, the 3-D Version. Wired.com, March 14, http://archive.wired. com/techbiz/people/news/2007/03/72962?currentPage=all, accessed July 29, 2014.

14

HIV on Documentary Television in Post-Apartheid South Africa Rebecca Hodes

Introduction South Africa has approximately 5.7 million inhabitants who are living with HIV, the largest HIV-positive population out of any other nation-state (UNAIDS, 2010). In 2003, after a protracted battle between HIV activists and the state over access to highly active antiretroviral treatment (ART), the South African government committed to providing free access to ART in the public health sector. As of mid-2011, the number of patients receiving ART in South Africa had reached 1.79 million (Johnson, 2012), rendering the program one of the largest public health initiatives in global history. This essay documents the diverse responses of documentary filmmakers to the emergence and escalation of HIV in South Africa, exploring how their work reflects the socio-cultural history of the epidemic. It focuses on a television program called Siyayinqoba/Beat It!, which began broadcast on public television in 1999, and developed into one of the most powerful health education initiatives in contemporary history. It explores Beat It!’s role as a public conduit for information about HIV and its treatment at a time in which information about HIV and its effects on the lives of real people was lacking in the public sphere. It describes the documentary and pedagogical strategies used by Beat It! to indigenize the HIV epidemic and its management, to foster scientifically accurate public understanding of the disease, and to improve access to life-saving medicines – all part of what Bishnupriya Gosh describes in her introduction to Part V as our virus zeitgeist. Beat It! is the world’s only television show which focuses primarily on HIV/AIDS. Over the years of its broadcast, Beat It! has grown from a television program to a A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



HIV on Documentary Television in Post-Apartheid South Africa

299

multimedia health awareness campaign which extends across radio stations, telephone helplines, and the Internet. Its 2009–2010 series, the latest for which audience ratings are available, indicated that the program had reached approximately 14 million viewers (Johnson et al., 2010: 22). The power of television as a medium for public education about HIV was demonstrated in 2005, when a nationally representative survey indicated that South Africans derived most of their knowledge about HIV from radio and television (Shisana et al., 2005). Yet little has been published about the representation of HIV and its treatment in the South African media, particularly on television. This chapter focuses on the ways in which people living with HIV have used the visual medium of documentary to represent themselves and to foster new political identities and affiliations in postapartheid South Africa. I describe the emergence of HIV subplots in docu-dramas and soap operas during the early 1990s, documenting how television producers used fictional characters to confront the social issues surrounding South Africa’s HIV epidemic, but failing to include the crucial issue of HIV treatment within these representations. As South Africa’s social movement for HIV treatment access gained momentum from 1998 forward, these issues could no longer be sidelined, and they became the focus of Beat It!’s programming in its first six series. Based on a study on these series, I explore how the show used the educative power of television to inform viewers about the many facets of HIV, providing viewers with accessible information about the biomechanics of HIV and its treatment at a time in which both infection and mortality rates were increasing, and in which the pandemic and its treatment became arguably the most contentious issue facing the South African polity.

HIV and the Democratic Transition The democratic transition in South Africa, during the first half of the 1990s, coincided with exponential increases in HIV-infection across Sub-Saharan Africa (ASSA, 2011). In 1993, the first National AIDS Plan was published. Shortly after the first democratic election of 1994, the new government doubled the national HIV budget, signaling its recognition of the challenges that HIV posed to South Africa’s fledgling democracy as well as a commitment to pursuing programs to meet these challenges. Under the leadership of the first Health Minister of a democratic South Africa, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, plans were made to expand the network of public clinics to treat sexually transmitted infections and to run large-scale HIV information and condom distribution campaigns (Phillips, 2004: 42). Discriminatory policies of HIV testing, including conducting HIV tests without informed consent or as a means of pre-employment screening, were barred. However, decades of apartheid health policy had grossly underdeveloped South Africa’s public health infrastructure. A lack of resources, and a health system in disarray, soon challenged the government’s ambitious plans to prevent and manage HIV. Subsequent scandals within the Department of Health mired the relationship between political officials, activists,

300

Rebecca Hodes

and healthcare authorities who had initially collaborated in the drafting of the National AIDS Plan. These included the Cabinet’s support for an industrial solvent called Virodene as a means of treating HIV patients (Myburgh, 2009), as well as the misappropriation of funds for HIV awareness initiatives in what became known as the “Sarafina II scandal” (Nattrass, 2007: 41). In spite of these political controversies, the 1990s thus saw the emergence of bold and diverse HIV awareness programs in South Africa, initiated collaboratively by NGOs and the government. Plays, puppet shows, posters, and billboards appeared across the country. In the absence of public access to effective treatment for HIV, these interventions focused largely on HIV prevention. In the celebratory atmosphere that surrounded South Africa’s transition to democracy, one discursive strategy employed by a range of HIV awareness initiatives was to fuse visual iconography and semantic markers to promote an association between popular support for democracy with HIV awareness and the practice of safer sex. One of the posters issued by the Beyond Awareness Campaign, for instance, featured a condom decorated with the pattern of the new South African flag and the slogan Viva Condoms (Figure 14.1) (Parker, 1994: 82–146). The Beyond Awareness Campaign was initiated in1996 by a consortium of health officials, civil society organizations, and communications experts to devise a media

Figure 14.1  Department of Health HIV awareness poster, issued circa 1999. Photo courtesy of Larissa Klazinga. Available at http://newsdesk.org/2010/06/fifa-accused-of-blocking-­ condom-distribution-safe-sex-information-during-world-cup/, accessed August 12, 2014.



HIV on Documentary Television in Post-Apartheid South Africa

301

and education strategy on HIV/AIDS. Based on the theories of participatory communication and action research, the campaign produced copious social representations of HIV/AIDS in South Africa, and helped to establish and articulate new subjectivities around living with HIV/AIDS (Tomaselli, 2011: 38; Parker, 1994: 63). For instance, the Living Openly Project, conducted under the campaign’s rubric, showcased the experiences of 31 HIV-positive South Africans, drawn from a range of different contexts and age groups. The project included the creation of a book, photographic exhibition, website, and documentary which was screened on the independent channel eTV (entertainment television). This was one of South Africa’s first multimedia programs to profile HIV-positive South Africans in ways that sought to convey their diversity and their vitality (Beyond Awareness Campaign, 2000). Television programs with an HIV focus or subplot also began to appear on the public broadcaster. In 1994, the soap opera Soul City made its debut on the SABC. It has since grown into the largest health communications project in African history, with a panoply of related programmes.1 Soul City is based on the model of “edutainment” pioneered by Miguel Sabido in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s, in which programs showcase social challenges and model possible solutions through the dramatic actions and travails of their characters (Fourie, 2011: 316). The show formed the crux of South Africa’s first multimedia HIV-awareness campaign, spanning television, radio, and print media and, since its initial broadcast, has run to a total of 11 series. By 1997, it had emerged as the number one rated television drama in the country, with some of the highest audience ratings on South African record, and critical acclaim due to its focus on difficult social issues relating to health, poverty, and gender inequality (Harding, 2003: 77). However, it is notable that Soul City neglected to raise the issue of HIV treatment until as late as 2006, eight years subsequent to South Africa’s first HIV activist campaign for public access to ART, and seven years subsequent to the successful piloting of an ART program in the province of the Western Cape (Hodes and Holm, 2011). Thus, while the program sought to convey public awareness about HIV and to promote health-seeking behaviors, it neglected the most critical issue facing people with HIV at this time – access to life-saving ART in the public health sector. In 1999, Yizo Yizo (roughly translated as “This is it”) was added to the bouquet of dramas on public television that included an HIV subplot. Presented from perspectives of different characters, most of whom were high school students, and shot on location at a high school in Johannesburg, Yizo Yizo attracted an audience of many millions, achieving cult status within its first series of broadcast. In the show’s gritty portrayals of life at a township school, its setting at a real school, and in its very name, it fused traditional elements of documentary programming – what Grierson famously termed “the the creative treatment of actuality” – with the realist impetus of contemporary television dramas in the mould of the tele-novela. The production of the show was initiated by the Department of Education, which sought to grapple with the challenges faced by urban youth through new educational

302

Rebecca Hodes

media. The show courted controversy in its gritty portrayals of social issues, including rape, sex work, murder, and HIV, and spurred inflammatory public debates on television, radio, and in the newspapers. Its opponents decried the antisocial effects its portrayals of violence and pre-marital sex could ostensibly have on young viewers. Television critics, on the other hand, lauded the show for its realism, although some also argued that it regurgitated disempowering myths and stereotypes about women, particularly in its dichotomous portrayals of Dudu (the “Madonna”) and Mantwa (the “deviant”) (Smith, 2010: 53, 69). The socio-economic realities surrounding the school were evident in the presence of gangsterism and drugs, learners who are five or six years older than others in their grades, violent crime, and transactional sex. A total of three series of Yizo Yizo have been produced, and the show has drawn massive and varied audiences, including a viewership of over 2 million for a single episode in its first series (Smith, 2010: 15). Tsha Tsha, another entertainment-education drama series with an HIV focus, began broadcast in 2003. The series constituted 78 half-hour shows, and was screened for three years during prime time on SABC 1. Like Yizo Yizo, Tsha Tsha aimed to depict the realities of South African life for a group of young people negotiating their way across a post-apartheid landscape characterized by poverty, HIV, crime, and violence. However, unlike the urban location of Yizo Yizo – and much of South Africa’s other youth-targeted television content – Tsha Tsha was set in a fictional rural village. Videos and training guides based on the series were developed into an HIV awareness program that was conducted in over 200 correctional facilities in South Africa. As with Beat It!, Tsha Tsha extended beyond the ambit of an ordinary television program to become a health education campaign provided in other contexts (CADRE, 2008). The production of a spate of South African television series with a focus on HIV was matched by growing international documentary interest in the subject. In 2001, a collaborative project between local and international filmmakers and producers was established to explore local responses to the HIV epidemic in Southern Africa. The collaboration was named Steps for the Future, and is to date the largest documentary film project to be undertaken in Africa, having produced 36 films ranging between four and 74 minutes in length (Levine, 2007: 73). The Steps for the Future films included narrative stories, documentaries, music videos, experimental movies, and public service announcements. The project was lauded for showcasing a new crop of South African cineastes, and for challenging HIV stigma and encouraging disclosure. One of the films, A Red Ribbon Around My House (dir. P. Rankoane, Hoya Productions and Day Zero Films, 2001), tells the story of Pinky Tiro, a woman living openly with HIV in Soweto, and her daughter, Ntombi, who is confronting the shame of her mother’s disclosure. Ntombi explains to the camera that the public perception of people with HIV is that they have been doing “wrong things in their life.” She states: “[W]hen you come and say you are HIV-positive, it’s the end of you. We don’t want you next to us. We don’t want to hear your suggestion. To us, you’re like a living corpse.” To counter denial and stigma around HIV, Pinky describes her idea for her ultimate awareness-raising act: “I want



HIV on Documentary Television in Post-Apartheid South Africa

303

a red ribbon around my house the day I die. And in the evening, people won’t see the red ribbon, so on the red ribbon there must be red globes, which will go on right through the night. And that is going to make people aware that there is AIDS.” The Steps films, together with some other documentaries produced around the time, were an important departure in South African films about HIV. In earlier documentaries which featured interviews with people living with HIV, their faces were often blacked out to conceal their identities, reifying the stigma and secrecy associated with the disease. By contrast, Steps films profiled people who were living openly with the virus, and who stated that their explicit purpose was to confront HIVrelated stigma, and to encourage people to get tested. The Steps documentaries were broadcast on national television. Mobile screens and projectors took the films into communities without cinemas where public screenings were held. As the history of the HIV pandemic in South Africa unfolded, changes in medical, social, and political perceptions were reflected in thematic shifts in the television programs about the disease. Instead of images that conveyed the anonymous, invasive nature of the disease, the viewer was presented increasingly with intimate portrayals of HIV-positive people, shot sympathetically through eye-level close-ups. From the late 1990s, documentary filmmakers began to explore ways in which to wrest portrayals of HIV from the flat plan of the television and cinema screen, and to situate these portrayals within the unconstrained spaces described in Alexandra Juhasz’s chapter on this theme below (Chapter 14). These included the repositioning of “HIV characters” from the realm of the fictional – in soap operas and dramas – to that of the “real” in documentary films and programs. However, although documentary films and television programs were focusing more on the challenges and realities presented by HIV, by 1999, when Beat It! broadcast its first episode, there was little information on serialized television programs about the ordinary lives of people living openly with HIV. By this time, the crucial medical advance of ART had improved the long-term survival with HIV in contexts in which the drugs were available, rendering the disease comparable to other chronic illnesses. The life-extending capacity of the treatment gave South African AIDS activists a new sense of purpose: to fight for access. Social mobilization around practices such as HIV testing, disclosure, and treatment advocacy therefore took on new imperatives. Moreover, the murder of HIV activist, Gugu Dlamini, after she had disclosed her HIV-positive status on public radio in 1998, galvanized both HIV activists and filmmakers to mount new social interventions to challenge the virulent stigma surrounding HIV at this time. By the year 2001, South Africa’s mortality rate for children under the age of five had skyrocketed to 80 per 1000 (Dorrington et al., 2006: 22). In August 2001, a coalition of HIV treatment activists and medical experts sued the Health Minister for failing to facilitate access to ART for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. The lines were thus drawn for a battle that was to be fought over HIV treatment access for the following years. It was in this context of conflict, confusion, and a steadily worsening HIV pandemic that a group of seasoned anti-apartheid, gay rights, and HIV activists began to produce the television program Beat It!

304

Rebecca Hodes

Beat It! episodes fused the television genres of talkshow and magazine programs. The show was anchored by a group of HIV-positive people who presented and discussed the issues raised in the “documentary insert,” a short feature that developed the show’s theme. The topicality of Beat It!’s content lent the show a current affairs edge, and its response to political controversies and medical advancements was therefore fairly rapid (particularly when production schedules allowed). Although some changes were made to format over the various series, the show’s structure has remained roughly the same over the broadcast of its nine series. Episodes would begin with presenters welcoming viewers, stating upfront that they were “living with HIV,” and reminding the audience that Beat It! was South Africa’s only television program specifically for HIV-positive people. After these opening statements, the presenter would introduce the topic of the documentary insert. These inserts showcased an encyclopedic array of issues relating to living with HIV in South Africa, including HIV testing, disclosing one’s status, sex, romance, and “positive living” – a term encompassing the many facets of living healthily with HIV. These inserts were filmed on site in dozens of different locales, ranging from metropolitan hospitals to rural clinics, and from university departments and government headquarters to nightclubs, schools, and churches. At times, the person profiled in the insert was a member of Beat It!’s support group. More often, she was an “ordinary” member of the public who had been approached because of her understanding of the episode’s core subject. Beat It! production staff sourced these guests through their extensive networks with civil society organizations working within the fields of health and human rights. The show sought to profile people because of the messages they embodied or because of what their stories could convey to the audience. Those who featured on the show were often leaders of the HIV treatment access movement, including social justice activists, trade union representatives, and healthcare workers. After the first documentary insert was screened, the episode cut back to the studio where the Beat It! support group would discuss its contents together with expert guests, conveying their own experiences relating to the insert. A second documentary insert followed, with more in-depth support group discussion and advice. Episodes would usually draw to a close on an upbeat note, with a list of “Things to remember,” and a motivational mantra such as “Remember, together we can Beat It!” or “Stay healthy, stay positive!” The presenter would high-five other support group members, or give a friendly wave to the viewers at home. As the credits rolled, the support group members would be shown hugging each other and their guests, and walking casually out of the studio. The show’s presenters and support group members remained the same for the duration of a series, and then changed in response to feedback from viewers, producers, and the support group members themselves. Faithful to the diversity of the support group, Beat It!’s discussions and documentary inserts featured a range of languages, including Afrikaans, English, Sotho, Xhosa, and Zulu. Participants conveyed a casual multiculturalism through mixing languages (“code-switching”) in single sentences. English subtitles accompanied all non-English speech. Through the support group’s portrayal as healthy, affectionate, and attractive, the program aimed to subvert stigma, to convey an image of a strong



HIV on Documentary Television in Post-Apartheid South Africa

305

and supportive HIV-positive community, and to foster viewer solidarity. The support group’s constitution was described by one of its members, Anthony Fernandes, as a “rainbox mix.” In its demographic diversity, Beat It!’s producers hoped to represent the experiences, interests, and concerns of a broad range of HIVpositive South Africans. The support group formed a microcosm of South Africa’s broader “positive community.” As Sipho Nhlapo, the co-presenter of the 1999 episode explained in an interview with the author in Johannesburg on March 20, 2007: What was important in Beat It! was the diversity that the program would show, where you had White, Colored, you had Indian people, Black … You had heterosexual people in there, you had gay people in there … All types of people in one, forming this community. And for me it was a message on its own – just the positive community, the support group. It was a very astute message. No matter what your social status is, or your economic status, you could still be part of a community.

Media theorists have attributed the rise in popularity of reality television programs over the past two decades to their portrayal of ordinary people grappling with complex experiences (Biressi and Nunn, 2005: 103; Lury, 2005: 30, 39). Because of the therapeutic culture of such programs, in which participants address viewers in purportedly less mediated ways than scripted programs, these shows also foster audience perceptions of inclusion and plurality. Viewers gain the sense that they, too, could be on television, blurring the division between the audience and the program’s anchors. These shows advance the formation of collective identities, as viewers and participants alike are united in studio discussions in which affinities are established and problems shared, often with the inclusion of letters, telephone calls, or guest appearances. Viewers are invited to join televisual communities, which frequently include personal revelations of pain and trauma. Such programs are filmed using techniques which foster emotional identification and a sense of privileged proximity, with the use of intimate framing, close-ups, and a reliance on high-key lighting to cultivate the impression of an unmediated reality. Beat It! adopted all of these strategies. Presenters used a style of direct address to invite the complicity of viewers. Dialogue between support group members was conducted like intimate conversations between friends (Figure 14.2). The inclusion of guests on each episode conveyed to viewers they that too may have been on the threshold of “televisibility,” invited to join the support group on an episode for which their personal experience qualified them as experts. Beat It!’s format, centered on the support group and infused with the different opinions and stories of its guests, embodied the concept of participatory programming (Groombridge, 1972: 220). Ginsburg has argued that “participatory” approaches in filmmaking are part of the collaborative strategies that have come to characterize “indigenous media,” in which communities have used a variety of media as expressions of self-representation and transformative cultural identities (1991: 93–95). Beat It! episodes were produced through the collaboration of the production staff and its participants – many of whom were living openly with HIV. Through its combination of the support group

306

Rebecca Hodes

Figure 14.2  The Beat It! support group discusses the sensitive topic of sex work as if they were conducting a casual conversation among friends. Beat It!, series 2003, episode 8.

with documentary inserts, the show spliced the genres of reality television and documentary. Through this amalgam of narrated investigative reports with talkshowstyle discussions, Beat It! provided an investigative dimension to the personal and direct depictions of the lived experiences of its participants and the many other people it profiled. Together with the show’s inclusivity and its promotion of a strong and unified HIV-positive identity, the political and educational dimensions of its material provided a basis for socially relevant programming. Beat It!’s first ever episode confronted HIV stigma directly. Despite the powerful social sanctions against declaring one’s HIV-positive status in public, 50 South Africans from diverse backgrounds did so in a highly public forum: on national television. Healthy and attractive, the appearance of these studio guests showed viewers that people with HIV did not necessarily look any different to people without the virus. One of the recurring messages from interviews with Beat It! participants was that the show was “real,” that it was a true-to-life representation of the challenges faced by HIV-positive South Africans. While past media had stigmatized HIV through portraying the disease in ways that discouraged audience identification and perpetuated misperceptions, Beat It! turned these conventions around, promoting factual information around HIV and encouraging a sense of solidarity between its viewers and its participants. In order to normalize the disease, Beat It! made intelligent use of the demythologizing nature of television, the medium’s perceived ability to capture reality and to foster understanding of complex subjects. The rise in popularity of reality programming is charged with having created a new public culture of exposure, confession, and witnessing via the medium of television (Biressi and Nunn, 2005: 107). Shows in which ordinary people share graphic



HIV on Documentary Television in Post-Apartheid South Africa

307

details about their personal lives with a talkshow audience are termed “therapeutic television.” South Africa has its own versions of tabloid talkshows modeled on the international success of Oprah. Local programmes such as Felicia and Noeleen are anchored by a single presenter with an ever-changing studio audience, and present similar blends of self-help and spirituality with a focus on current affairs. Beat It! mirrored various conventions of the reality TV talkshow. Among these were its focus on the intimate experiences of the support group and studio guests, and its audience involvement through letters and telephone calls. The show’s participatory format drew on the interactive dimension of television to challenge taboos and to encourage public engagement with HIV-related issues. Through portraying a diverse range of HIV-positive people who talked honestly about subjects ranging from the banal to the titillating, the show aimed to counter AIDS fatigue while at the same time desensationalizing the topics of HIV and sex.

The Politics of HIV Treatment on Beat It! In June 1999, Thabo Mbeki replaced Nelson Mandela as the second president of democratic South Africa and he appointed Manto Tshabalala-Msimang as the new Minister of Health. Their involvement in public debates regarding the nature and treatment of HIV over the next few years was to become the greatest source of political controversy to have marred South Africa’s post-apartheid history (Posel, 2004: 140). Both Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang opposed the national rollout of ART on the basis that there was insufficient evidence to support the efficacy and benefit of the treatment. From the late 1990s until the passing of the National Strategic Plan in 2007, political controversies surrounding the nature of HIV and the merits of its treatment became the focus of South Africa’s HIV activist movement and attendant media. At least 330,000 South Africans died of AIDS due to their failure to access ART during the presidential tenure of Thabo Mbeki (Nattrass, 2008; Chigwedere et al., 2008: 412). Beat It! episodes broadcast between 1999 and 2004 included various critiques of the government, particularly regarding its obstruction of programs for the prevention-of-mother-to-child-transmission (PMTCT). However, Beat It!’s most condemnatory portrayals of the state came to the fore in the 2005 and 2006 series, during which episodes exposed and denounced the alliances between executive political officials, AIDS denialists, and the purveyors of false cures for HIV. The first reaction of public health authorities to early cases of HIV was to search for a biological agent, invoking modern scientific language to quell hysteria and promote awareness about the modes of transmission. Once the virus had been isolated, HIV/AIDS was redefined as a collection of medical problems and gradually constructed as a chronic disease, particularly after the emergence of ART in 1996 (Oppenheimer, 1992: 63). Whereas the earliest HIV activist interventions sought to inform people about how to prevent HIV infection through promoting the use of condoms and clean needles, a panoply of new activist strategies emerged, including

308

Rebecca Hodes

campaigns for public education about drugs development and patent laws, and new means of opposing stigma and normalizing HIV. Since its founding in 1998, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), South Africa’s leading activist organization in the struggle for access to HIV treatment, championed a scientific approach to HIV advocacy and education. Using a range of advocacy and media strategies, and through marches, treatment literacy workshops, and participation in the various aspects of the production of Beat It! and other activist-aligned educational media, TAC has sought to promote scientifically accurate understandings about HIV and its treatment (Hodes and Holm, 2011: 420–421; Hodes, 2010: 640–656). Beat It! reflected TAC’s promotion of HIV treatment literacy. Dozens of the program’s participants shared their knowledge of HIV and ART by discussing the biological mechanisms of transmission, the side effects of different ART medicines, and the diagnostics necessary for effective monitoring of HIV-positive patients. The show also relied on computer simulations to represent processes such as the viral replication of HIV, using the “molecular animation” described in Ostherr’s chapter on this theme (Chapter 13 above), to demystify and, crucially, to verify, the biomechanical workings of the virus. Confronted with public confusion about the causal relationship between HIV and AIDS, and the best means of treating the disease, Beat It! provided accessible, biomedical information about the nature of ART, advising viewers on how to access the drugs and to manage possible adverse effects. The program’s participants made tactical use of medical discourses, for instance, in their casual and colloquial descriptions of ART medicines. Individual drugs were given nicknames with local resonance, establishing a symbolic connection between the medicines and South African currency – the rand. As support group member Lihle Dlamini explained, “Some people have names for ARVs. 3TC is three rand, d4T is four rand, efavirenz is five rand … So we must use a language which the people will understand” (Beat It! series 2004, episode 25). Antiretroviral drugs were frequently referred to as “ama-antiretrovirals,” their pluralizing prefix transferred from Zulu, further illustrating the linguistic assimilation of medical terms into local discourses. Moreover, Beat It! frequently employed “medical framing,” that is, the use of images and messages that conveyed the authority of scientific medicines (Treichler, 1999: 130). Across the various series, episodes urged viewers to consult a medical doctor at the first sign of illness, whether from an opportunistic infection with HIV, or from a side effect relating to treatment. When doctors were interviewed within clinical settings, they were usually pictured wearing white coats and stethoscopes, and often seated next to computers or in front of medical diagrams. Costume and setting were thus used by the program as symbolic confirmation of medical and technological authority. Episodes highlighted the prestige of black doctors and medical specialists to counter public fears that scientific responses to HIV, including HIV testing and diagnostics, were controlled and imposed by whites. Thus, the program made conscious use of South Africa’s social faultlines to advance crucial messages about the reconfiguration of medical authority in the post-apartheid era. For instance, in Beat It!’s 2005 series (episode 25), Dr. Eula Mothibi from the HIV



HIV on Documentary Television in Post-Apartheid South Africa

309

Figure 14.3  Dr. Simnikiwe Mayaphi, interviewed in his laboratory, describes South Africa’s HIV vaccine trial. Beat It!, series 2005, episode 25.

Unit of the Western Cape Department of Health, explained the importance of the Hepatitis B vaccine. The episode then turned to the topical issue of an HIV vaccine, and featured an interview with Dr. Simnikiwe Mayaphi, Perinatal HIV Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand, and a director of South Africa’s HIV vaccine trial, who explained the various phases of the trial (Figure 14.3). The documentary insert was stocked with images of medical modernity, from the sleek building of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine at the University of Cape Town (Figure 14.4), to the laboratory technicians working amidst highly specialized medical equipment. Numerous episodes featured black doctors whose medical backgrounds fused Western biomedicine and African traditional healing, an acknowledgment of the syncretic beliefs that many South Africans hold towards medical practices, fusing elements of both “traditional” and “Western” medicine in their understandings of illness and health. For example, Dr. Nceba Gqaleni (Deputy Dean of the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine, University of Kwazulu-Natal), was introduced as “an expert in traditional and alternative medicine,” and one of the show’s resident doctors, Dr. Trevor Majoro was described at various instances in the 2006 series as a “specialist HIV doctor,” as well as a “qualified traditional healer.” Through Beat It!’s frequent inclusion of these medical figures, the program sought to convey the message that Western biomedicine and African traditional healing practices were not mutually exclusive, and could coexist comfortably as in the practice of these black doctors. Doctors appeared with such frequency on Beat It! that some, including Nombulelo Madala, Trevor Majoro, and Hermann Reuter, seemed themselves to be members of the support group. Reuter was one of the clinicians at the Médecins Sans Frontières

310

Rebecca Hodes

Figure 14.4  The Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine at the University of Cape Town. Beat It!, series 2005, episode 25.

(MSF) clinic in Khayelitsha, and was acquainted with many TAC activists in the. Many of these activists had been treated personally by Reuter at the MSF clinic, which in 1999 was the first to make ART publicly available for the purposes of PMTCT in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Reuter’s role on Beat It! was to provide advice from a medical perspective, and in an early episode of the program he was introduced by one of the support group members as “Dr. Themba” (the Xhosa word for “hope”). This episode’s discussion centered on shingles and swollen lymph nodes, and Reuter gave a concise account of their symptoms and treatment, encouraging the audience to seek early medical attention (Beat It! series 2004, ­episode 7). Reuter also allayed fears about persistent swollen lymph glands in his explanation that, “Although it’s irritating for you … it’s actually a good sign for the doctor, because it shows that your body has got an immune response against the virus.” However, he also explained the situations in which swollen lymph glands may be “dangerous” or “a sign of a more serious disease,” such as in the case of undiagnosed TB. As with most other instances of medical advice on the program, Reuter provided a clear, medical explanation of HIV but also a sense of succor, while remaining frank about the physical effects of the disease. At the end of the episode, support group member Faghmeda Miller thanked “Dr. Themba” for his participation, and said: “I think we can all give the doctor a hug.” As the other members applauded, presenter Mercy Makhalemele approached Reuter to shake his hand. He drew her into a warm hug, demonstrating their familiarity and friendship. In a later episode of the show, Reuter was portrayed at work in the MSF clinic in Khayelitsha, in consultation with a mother and child on ART. Footage showed Reuter examining the child gently, afterward presenting him with a “balloon”



HIV on Documentary Television in Post-Apartheid South Africa

311

(a blown-up latex glove) adorned with a smiley face, as a reward for braving the visit. The accessibility and supportiveness of Beat It!’s staple medical participants were central to the show’s portrayal of biomedical authority.

Conclusions During the years of South Africa’s political transition to democracy, a spate of documentary programs, television dramas, and other shows broadcast on public television aimed to subvert HIV stigma, to encourage disclosure, and to foster greater public awareness about living positively with HIV. Despite the strides made by innovations such as the introduction of HIV-positive characters to popular TV series and soaps, however, Beat It! was pioneering in its presentation of the realities of quotidian life for people living with HIV. Up until the end of the 1990s, when Beat It! began to air, South African viewers were yet to be exposed to demythologizing portrayals of HIV, its treatment, and the people affected by it. Beat It! was to take up this challenge. Beat It! episodes used various strategies to challenge the contention that Africans were passive recipients of Western AIDS education and treatment initiatives. The show portrayed ART as itself an “African solution.” By championing the work of doctors and through staunch support for ART as the most effective mean of treating HIV, Beat It! sought to reconfigure past perceptions about scientific medicine and to “indigenize” scientific responses to the disease. Beat It! aimed to inspire a popular view of science as an African enterprise, enacted by black doctors and laboratory specialists in the service of black patients. Medical procedures and products – including HIV tests and condoms – were demystified and promoted by the program. Episodes also used the persuasive power of personal testimony to challenge misperceptions about these medical interventions. In refutation of the false dichotomy established between “Western scientific medicine” and “African traditional healing,” Beat It! episodes showed how “African” and “Western” healing practices could be combined successfully. But, while the program was careful not to malign traditional healing methods, it criticized unfounded and dangerous claims regarding the efficacy of traditional remedies marketed as HIV/AIDS “cures.” The Health Minister’s alignments with HIV dissidents provided fertile opportunities for quackery and for the commercial exploitation of people living with HIV who feared initiating ART as a result of misinformation regarding its toxicity. Beat It! exposed the harm wrought by false “curative claims” and instead presented viewers with frank information about the optimal, evidence-based treatments for HIV, and the easiest ways to access them. For these reasons, Beat It!’s first episode was a watershed in South Africa’s history of HIV disclosure. In the years preceding its broadcast, HIV remained shrouded by silence. The disease was considered sensitive partly due to its sexual modes of transmission. This, in combination with the euphoria of apartheid’s end and the ANC’s assumption of power, led to the sidelining HIV in the first years of South African

312

Rebecca Hodes

democracy. Beat It! aimed to change this through broadcasting the message that HIV was a medical condition rather than a manifestation of divine punishment or sexual excess. In this sense, the show provided viewers with an alternative, evidencebased understanding of HIV, which opposed the AIDS denialism and obstruction of HIV treatment by key government officials. Using the power of the televisual medium, Beat It! exposed the harm of the government’s response to HIV, and through championing disclosure and articulating a language of openness to its growing audiences, Beat It! challenged the stigma around HIV and taught its viewers how to embody the ideals of HIV treatment activism: staying alive and well with the disease, and uniting to form a powerful HIV-positive collective.

Note 1 These include Soul Buddyz – a drama series aimed at 8–12 year-olds – and Kwanda, an reality TV program about the work of volunteers in five South African provinces, described by its producers as a “community makeover.”

References ASSA (2011) Models. Actuarial Society of South Africa Aids Committee, http://aids.­ actuarialsociety.org.za/404.asp?pageid=3145, accessed July 29, 2014. Beyond Awareness Campaign (2000) Living Openly: HIV-Positive South Africans Tell Their Stories. Pretoria: HIV/AIDS and STD Directorate, Department of Health. Available at http://www.redribbon.co.za/living-openly.php?show=mymenu2, accessed July 29, 2014. Biressi, A. and Nunn, H. (2005) Reality TV: Realism and Revelation. London: Wallflower Press. CADRE (2008) Tsha Tsha DVD Discussion Guide, http://www.cadre.org.za/files/TT_ dvdguide.pdf, accessed July 29, 2014. Chigwedere, P., Seage, G., Gruskin, S., Lee, T., and Essex, M. (2008) Estimating the Lost Benefits of Antiretroviral Drug Use in South Africa. Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, 49(4), 410–415. Dorrington, R., Johnson, L., Bradshaw, D., and Daniel, T. (2006) The Demographic Impact of HIV/AIDS in South Africa: National and Provincial Indicators for 2006. Cape Town: Centre for Actuarial Research, South African Medical Research Council, and Actuarial Society of South Africa. Fourie, L. (2011) The Value of Entertainment-Education: The Case of Soul City. In Tomaselli, K. and Chasi, C. (eds.) Development and Public Health Communication. Cape Town: Pearson Education. Ginsburg, F. (1991) Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village. Cultural Anthropology, 6(1), 92–112. Groombridge, B. (1972) Television and the People: A Programme for Democratic Participation. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Harding, F. (2003) Africa and the Moving Image: Television, Film and Video. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 16(1), 69–84.



HIV on Documentary Television in Post-Apartheid South Africa

313

Hodes, R. (2008) Diseased Dystopias? HIV and the City in South African Films. Postamble, 4(2), 1–16. Hodes, R. (2010) Televising Treatment: The Political Struggle for Antiretrovirals on South African Television. Social History of Medicine, 23(3), 639–659. Hodes, R. and Holm, T.N. (2011) Piloting Antiretroviral Therapy in South Africa: The Role of Partnerships in the Western Cape’s Provincial Roll-Out. African Journal of AIDS Research, 10(4), 415–425. Johnson, L. (2012) Access to Antiretroviral Treatment in South Africa, 2004–2011. The South African Journal of HIV Medicine, 13(1), 22–27. Johnson, S., Kincaid, L., Laurence, S., Chikwava, F., Delate, R., and Mahlasela, L. (2010) Second National HIV Communication Survey 2009. Pretoria: JHHESA. Levine, S. (2007) Steps for the Future: HIV/AIDS, Media Activism and Applied Visual Anthropology in Southern Africa. In Pink, S. (ed.) Visual Interventions: Applied Visual Anthropology, pp. 71–90. New York: Berghahn. Lury, K. (2005) Interpreting Television. London: Hodder Arnold. Myburgh, J. (2009) In the Beginning There Was Virodene. In Cullinan, K. and Thom, A. (eds.) The Virus, Vitamins & Vegetables: The South African HIV/AIDS Mystery, pp. 1–15. Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Nattrass, N. (2007) Mortal Combat: AIDS Denialism and the Struggle for ARVs in South Africa. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Nattrass, N. (2008) AIDS and the Scientific Governance of Medicine in Post-Apartheid South Africa. African Affairs, 107(427), 157–176. Oppenheimer, G.M. (1992) Causes, Cases, and Cohorts: The Role of Epidemiology in the Historical Construction of AIDS. In Fee, E. and Fox, D.M. (eds.) AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease, pp. 49–83. Berkeley: University of California Press. Parker, W. (1994) The Development of Community-Based Media for AIDS Education and Prevention in South Africa: Towards an Action-Based Participatory Research Model. MA thesis, University of Natal, Durban, South Africa. Phillips, H. (2004) HIV/AIDS in the Context of South Africa’s Epidemic History. In Kauffman, K. and Lindauer, D. (eds.) AIDS in South Africa: The Social Expression of a Pandemic, pp. 31–47. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Posel, D. (2004) Sex, Death and the Fate of the Nation: Reflections on the Politicization of Sexuality in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Africa, 75(2), 125–153. Shisana, O. et al. (2005) South African National HIV Prevalence, HIV Incidence, Behaviour and Communication Survey. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council. Smith, R. (2010) Yizo Yizo: This Is It? Representations and Receptions of Violence and Gender Relations. MA Dissertation, University of Natal, Durban, South Africa. Available at http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za/xmlui/handle/10413/3558, accessed July 29, 2014. Tomaselli, K. (2011) Sham Reasoning and Pseudo-Science: Myths and Mediatisation of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. In Tomaselli, K. and Chasi, C. (eds.) Development and Public Health Communication. Cape Town: Pearson Education. Treichler, P.A. (1999) How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. UNAIDS (2010) UNAIDS Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic 2010. Geneva: UNAIDS.

15

Digital AIDS Documentary Webs, Rooms, Viruses, and Quilts Alexandra Juhasz

Introduction In this chapter, try as I will, I just won’t quite be able to spin these pages into a web; I will fail to stitch my words and images into a quilt. The page is flat. The chapter is linear. A quilt has texture. This weighty anthology is long and done. If I was with you in a room or even on the Internet, talking live and inhabiting space together, I might better spin and stitch as methods to both describe and enact digital documentary tactics, as well as to remember and perhaps also initiate a contemporary AIDS activism. Ah well: you (we) are (t)here. My self-reflexive, self-critical introduction devoted to form and method initiates and enacts one of the concerns of the chapter (as multi-mediated stitching and spinning might have done as well): how the changing shapes of documentary and memorials contribute to or form our shifting knowledge of HIV/AIDS and the actions such ideas engender. I will focus upon four tangled lines of thinking and one meta concern: 1  How documentaries change as they move from the linear forms of video used by myself and others when the AIDS crisis began in the 1980s to today’s online digital documentary forms. 2  How memory, memorials, and documentaries are dependent upon their forms and materials. 3  How documentary and other memorials have and might continue to serve AIDS activism, as HIV/AIDS itself changes in space, across time, and in relation to its histories of activism and transmission. A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



Digital AIDS Documentary

315

4  How using documentary (and discussions about it) to build temporary memorials, in rooms or on pages, might also serve HIV/AIDS activism and its memory. 5  How representational technologies – from the metaphor to the quilt to the body to digital manifestations of these earlier forms – clarify and tangle lines of thinking and feeling through practices of cutting, linking, displacing, and flowing. This chapter was first a live talk in a room making use of PowerPoint, websites, digital video clips, and even a 16 mm film, not to mention the feelings that I attempted to orchestrate with some care if not as much control.1 As was true there, here I will make interweaving claims in a variety of formats. However, unlike in that room, for this book-bound communicative endeavor I cannot rely upon all of new media’s easily available technologies and their discrete and mixable potential for montage or transmission; nor can I engage with screens, walls, quilts (or even tables; more on this soon), even as the work I consider most definitively does. (My writerly play with feelings is open for your self-aware critique. The role of feeling in documentary, memorials, and their related activism is now our under-the-table concern.) Sadly, this particular endeavor’s lost affordances of certain new (media) spaces and technologies must be left for other AIDS activists: those who move online or meet together in rooms. But, given our shared limits here, we might together consider the expressive, political, and communicative potentials for this scholarly encounter with AIDS documentary’s current webs, especially works such as this one (and the works it considers) that understand ourselves to be in the “committed” and “personal” vein. For this reason, I have included a few tokens of the stimulating and giving editorial commentary that I received – first via track changes in Word over email – as evidence of the still vibrant activities of “paper” or at least word-bound transmissions of knowledge within communities of political intellectual practice. Furthermore, given that I am one editor, with Alisa Lebow, of this entire Blackwell collection, this reflexive gesture towards my own editorial interlocutors and experience as writer serves to mark this usually unseen (and under-appreciated) practice of intellectual linking, building, and sharing that underwrites (book and essay) writing.

Video Remains Documentaries typically begin as actions in the world and end as images in rooms thanks to mediating technologies. While the lived experience that launches them can occur in many places – on a beach, in a conference room – they have been historically received in a smaller selection of places that have been best suited to hold and use them. My 2005 experimental documentary, Video Remains, evokes and mourns my long-dead friend Jim, in a dialogue that I forced – with video – across time and between worldly places and people.

316

Alexandra Juhasz

Figure 15.1  Jim in Video Remains (Alexandra Juhasz, 2005) at the Silver Lake Film Festival, 2006. Photo by Alexandra Juhasz.

In the video, I edit together one lengthy long-take of Jim on the beach in Miami in 1993, a few months before he died of AIDS, with select clips of gay kids of color in an AIDS support group at AIDS Project Los Angeles so many years later in 2004 (itself now many years ago), and two lengthy scenes at a barber shop in Silver Lake also in 2004, where I tape my stylist and I talking about AIDS and loss through the mirror. Shot where I was at various times, these scenes are seen in the order of my preference and on one screen. First enjoyed in the glittery showplaces of gay and lesbian film festivals around the world, Video Remains continues to have a minor home viewership on smaller systems and to private audiences through the videos and DVDs that I self-distribute. Video Remains is my only recent documentary not to be available (for free) online, thereby most ready for a mobile- and micro-viewing public, for reasons associated to both its economic marginality (no distributor has bet that its sales will justify the costs of online distribution), and its author’s formal intractability (my belief that because it is a “duration piece,” and a formally experimental one at that, its arguments are best served by a stable and even sizable screen). As we see right here and now (Figure 15.1), dead people and their documentaries materialize on flat planes that hold and display them. So I begin by asking: how might we recognize documentary that locates itself and its reception in unfamiliar, unconstrained places?

Unconstrained Webs In participant materials provided for an MIT workshop (2000) on Tim BernersLee’s book Weaving the Web (1999) – which is and still available online at



Digital AIDS Documentary

317

www.doc88.com/p-314620000066.html – a PowerPoint page called “Summary of Design Considerations” reads: Tim has described the evolution of the Web and noted key design that influenced its essence. The Web: ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Allows for connections between different pieces of information. Is unconstraining. Hides computers and networking. Is a place where you can put absolutely any information. Is completely minimalist. Allows for universality. Is a project management tool that allows us to work together by sharing information freely and readily.

Today, documentaries too can happen in, on, and through webs.

The Creative Treatment of Actuality In the 1940s, John Grierson defined the documentaries of his time with prescience. For even today, documentaries are manufactured, at least in part, as creative treatments of some actualities that might have first occurred in once-lived spaces like hair salons or beaches. However the spaces they themselves now occupy for reception, or perhaps activation, are not so much like the documentaries of Grierson’s time but rather more akin to the world that documentaries document: neither linear nor flat, neither necessarily in a room nor on a screen. Soon, I’ll show you a documentary on a table. Users tilt it to access the AIDS documents that are stored within and then are virtually or metaphorically stitched onto its surface as a “quilt.” Today, montage practices – ever the documentary artists’ expressive purview – have become the users’ as well. Reception, sometimes understood as the seat of documentary (Eitzen, 1995), becomes just another bit of source material.

The Page and the Room How might I show on a page that contemporary digital representations of HIV/ AIDS, happening in something akin to three-dimensional space and non-linear time, might be a new manner of AIDS documentary – one deeply connected to older documentaries to be sure? And why this wish to show rather than to tell? To enact rather than didact? The orchestration of feelings, my friends: the creative treatment of actuality … Facts when treated just right beget feelings. Feelings are stored, unconstrained, in bodies. Feelings and facts that are shared between people can instigate collective action: I’ve seen it. Digital AIDS documentaries enable new kinds of representations, receptions,

318

Alexandra Juhasz

memories, memorials, and actions, much like those that can happen in a room and less like what I can do on this page. Rooms (and webs) and pages are different: ●● ●●

●●

●● ●●

●●

●●

Rooms and pages allow for connections between pieces of information and people. Both are constraining and unconstraining. Rooms have walls and also doors. Pages are turnable but not inhabitable, except metaphorically, which connects them, metaphorically, to certain kinds of webs. Rooms hide, refuse, and/or hold computers and networking, depending upon architectural norms and resources, wires, routers, and rules. Pages can only (poorly) represent these technologies. Neither a room nor a page is a place that holds absolutely any information. Rooms are minimalist, or not, depending upon décor, taste, resources, norms, and uses. Academic pages tend to be uber-minimal. Rooms allow for universality, but only in principle. Most rooms are inaccessible to most people. Academic pages are uber-inaccessible (unless they are put online). Rooms and pages are project management tools that allow us to work together by sharing information freely and readily.

We are together on a page where I am trying (with uber-technological constraints) to spin a documentary AIDS web that holds history, memory, anger, love, and theory. Here, you have limited possibilities to perform, which just might enable more opportunity to contemplate or feel. But this, I’ll never know.

The Material Digital documentaries can be composed from a variety of materials, albeit all transcoded into 0 s and 1 s. On computers that sit in rooms, we watch historical traces made into digital reflections of other rooms once real. These materials are then stitched with traces of grief, since by definition, the rooms, images, and words of HIV/AIDS are signs of loss. But on the page, things work differently (Ryan, 1999): Electronic Ephemeral Spatial Decentered Rhizome Structure  Diversity Chaos Dialogism Parallelism Fluidity Dynamic

Print Durable Linear Centered Tree Structure Unity Order Monologism Sequentiality Stolidity Static



Digital AIDS Documentary

319

Visual Aids Imagine a webpage, if you will. Since most past and present HIV/AIDS representation have migrated to the web, I’ll randomly choose one digital page to begin, www. visualaids.org; many more will follow on these pages. This one represents the holdings, exhibitions, events, projects, and “home” of Visual AIDS. Its mission reads: “Visual AIDS utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV + artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.” Not yet done, HIV/AIDS changes in its many discrete and particular places (urban and rural, global north and south), across the years that it has been experienced by individuals and communities (as death sentence or as manageable, chronic condition), and in response to our cultural and activist productions that create and transform AIDS knowledge and experience. Some of our responses to HIV/AIDS are static, discrete, complete objects bound to their place and time; others are flows of material; and others still turn still mementoes into moving ones, what with all our current capacity to cut, paste, and transmit. If I could show Visual AIDS to you now (as I once did in Montreal in a room with an audience of HIV/AIDS scholars and activists), I would skim along its surfaces, landing on and then almost randomly linking images of once discrete objects from an art show I found there called “Making Do”: ●● ●●

●●

a black rat [“Untitled (Rat),” Mark Morrisroe, 1986] a minimalist sculpture of fabric, safety pins, and metal loops, hanging on a string [“Feeling Helpless like the Elephant Man,” Chuck Nanney, 1998] a yellow boa hanging from a room’s corner [“Ravin’,” Curtis Carman, 2002]

My fluid travels might make you feel melancholy or too rushed or utterly bemused: why is she moving so fast? Why these three objects? Even so, we would share a seriousness because this is AIDS after all, and the images are by definition of loss, pain, and disease. However our noble feelings would be as unique as our humble histories, and for this reason, if we were each to visit the website on our own, our tempos of activation would be diverse, as would our interests and associations and therefore our “digital documentaries.” (Yes, I am arguing that a digital documentary is the stringing together, creatively, of digital documents). If you encountered the site yourself (feel free to do so right now on a nearby screen), you would edit its documents into your own digital documentary with a method somewhat similar to the labors of the authors of the very website, and even (sort of) the artists of the documents the site holds, who are all creatively reckoning, like you and me, with time, space, loss, memorials, and AIDS, albeit through different materials (the selected AIDS artists crafted with stuff; the web designers coded these things; the digital documentarian travels, searches, and links). Now, if we were together in a room, and one of us was stitching up the website while the other watched on a screen – one of us authoring an ephemeral digital documentary in real and dynamic time, the other witnessing – the montage of feelings

320

Alexandra Juhasz

about AIDS and the digital that would be animating the room might itself aid us in understanding our unique situations regarding AIDS, that is, if we were (able) to talk together about our feelings and ideas about loss, archives, images, documents, and HIV/AIDS. I imagine with just the right documents, in just the right room, and just the right sort of linking and conversation, we could be moved to action. I’ve seen it. I’ve even documented it. But as we also know, documents of others’ activation or even activism do not necessarily instigate new actions (Gaines, 1999).

Online AIDS Documentary With a nod to Grierson, I’ll suggest that an “online AIDS documentary” is a new kind of mass of archived, networked traces of evidence of AIDS actualities and activisms, curated creatively or even biologically, in obstructed and/or connected, feverish and/or tame ways, that occur via screens and inside of bodies, so as to infect other arteries that may go on to move history, activism, and feelings. You might be thinking, at this point, that we don’t usually engage with this new sort of documentary in rooms together. Thus, while documentary authoring slides and mushrooms invitingly within the digital, a collective, concerted reception or response seems to recede. This is a matter of real concern if our interest is the relation between documentary and activism (Lopez, 1990). Thus, thinking about radical reception practices becomes a necessary facet for our activist digital documentaries (Burton, 1986).

We Care I used to be in rooms like that: sharing feelings and ideas about HIV/AIDS with people and then sharing that sharing via video to others in different rooms, where the main agenda for the audience was to talk about our ideas and feelings about the video. I made the AIDS documentary video We Care: A Video for Care Providers of People Affected by AIDS (The Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise, 1990) as part of an activist community in New York City in the 1980s. We made inexpensive camcorder documentary for ourselves, to rile us up, to educate each other, to prove that we were alive and angry: inhabiting rooms, apartments, and history even as dominant culture attempted to erase, ridicule, or condemn us. Our videos were meant to play in rooms of activists and PWAs. Some played in museums, others in community centers. We Care, made as my doctoral research and produced by a collective of urban women of color, was made for care providers of people affected by AIDS. Once completed, we got a NYSCA grant to distribute it, for free, to 50 community sites across NYC. Our action was community reception. When the participants from the group took it somewhere and showed it, the grant paid them $50 for their time and expertise. We knew that the best safer sex education came from community members addressing their own communities in familiar places like living rooms, church basements, and local non-profits.



Digital AIDS Documentary

321

We were living through the first iteration of this crisis, where a politics and practice of caring was all we could do. By connecting to each other, then linking to our communities, and always to the larger social and political issues that framed our communal encounter with the virus, we found efficacy at a moment where our friends died even so. According to Bishnupriya Ghosh (personal email, 2012), in her readings of this essay, our labors also changed the course of the flow of the disease: It is not that “care” was not a critical concern in the earlier decades of HIV/AIDS activism, but the fight for research took center stage – often. Part of this changed circumstance has to do with an increased popular understanding of the virus – its behaviors, its ecology, its vectors of transmission, as indeed, its intelligence (a bioinformatic form).2 “We Care,” then, is not just a biomedical turn but a change in knowledge. We have learned from the resilience of the virus, its ability to use ungovernable human sociality (exchanges of blood and fluids) and global exchanges (goods and people) for its ends; we, too, develop resilient networks, not death-dealing or surreptitious, but vital like an “artery,” that also use human sociality (our ability for contact, love, care, information exchange) and global communication infrastructures to live with this tough enemy.

Made for self-education and politicized sociality – like so many of our movement’s activist tapes – We Care is now also a memorial: a record of the activism and legacy of Marie (and several others) who died within a year of the video’s production. If I played it for you now, you would see Marie caught on scratchy VHS camcorder tape (itself duplicated onto some digital format no doubt: why bother with that clunky plastic box and its outdated play-back mechanisms!). You would understand that she is long-dead, and you would account for that as you will: a fact associated to your feelings, politics, and/or thoughts about HIV/AIDS, media forms, and death. Her haunting would have this weight and no more. It might be enough. If I showed you, both of us together in a room, a clip of Marie giving a tour of her apartment from the section of the video called “Being at Home with HIV,” as I have so so often done when I screen the tape in public because Marie is charming and eloquent and also funny in this clip, even as and because she so well embodies her race (African-American) and class (working poor) and gender (female) and age (late-middle) and HIV-status (positive) and place (her apartment in Queens) and politics (HIV + people are the same as they ever were, which itself was exceedingly radical in its moment – the very idea of it but particularly that it was articulated and embodied by a black grandmotherly figure, so few of whom had come out with AIDS at this moment due to paralyzing stigma and associated violence, which you might not know about unless I told you so), you might not approve that I only screened a few minutes of Marie, in a rush as I might be to get on to the next section below – Video in the Archive – ever mindful of time. You might think I was not honoring the dead by turning them into the digital (I’d already skimmed over the art objects and Jim, remember?).

322

Alexandra Juhasz

What do our unique digital documentary viewing practices and their associated feelings, enabled so readily by digital memorials, tell us about AIDS, mourning, videotape, activism, and authoring? Could we talk together about this in a room?

Video in the Archive Today, many of our early AIDS documentaries, like my own We Care, have migrated to new media’s archives and webs. AIDS activists of today can easily connect to our past productions of knowledge, community, and caring. You can find this description of We Care online in one of its digital homes – at the New York Public Library’s Royal S. Marks Collection, care of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS – and thanks to the committed labor of Jim Hubbard who painstakingly took it there: Title: We care: a video for care providers of people affected by AIDS [videorecording] / The Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise (WAVE). Imprint: New York: W.A.V.E. / Media Network, 1990. Description: 1 videocassette (30 min.): sd., col.; 1/2 in. Credits: Producer, director, editor, WAVE: Marcia Edwards, Alexandra Juhasz, Aida Matta, Juanita Mohammed, Sharon Penceal, Glenda Smith, Carmen Velasquez; project director, Alexandra Juhasz. Summary: This tape by members of the WAVE collective is designed to assist care providers for people with AIDS. Marie, a woman who has tested positive for the HIV virus, conducts a tour of her home, outlining the precautions she takes to protect her and her family’s health. Marie’s advice is reinforced by a physician who also stresses supportiveness for the AIDS patient and the importance of the caregiver to watch for any personal changes. Caregivers offer advice for helping persons with AIDS and caution against the desire to be superhuman; revitalizing breaks are essential for the wellbeing of both caregivers and clients. One volunteer addresses the issues of grief and loss, the need to get affairs in order, and the benefits derived from contacting religious organizations and funeral directors. Coping with AIDS is alleviated by tapping into the AIDS network of support groups and becoming informed about entitlements, counseling and legal services, and experimental drug programs. To dispel misinformation regarding AIDS, the tape is punctuated by Books of AIDS Myths/Facts.

We build new digital homes for our old video memories.

Camera Memories We build digital documentary memorials against loss. These are our archives of activism. For example, the ACT UP Oral History Project holds 100, and counting, recent interviews of its New York members. According to its About Section, its purpose:



Digital AIDS Documentary

323

is to present comprehensive, complex, human, collective, and individual pictures of the people who have made up ACT UP/New York. These men and women of all races and classes have transformed entrenched cultural ideas about homosexuality, sexuality, illness, health care, civil rights, art, media, and the rights of patients. They have achieved concrete changes in medical and scientific research, insurance, law, health care delivery, graphic design, and introduced new and effective methods for political organizing. These interviews reveal what has motivated them to action and how they have organized complex endeavors. We hope that this information will de-mystify the process of making social change, remind us that change can be made, and help us understand how to do it. (ACT UP continues to fight to end the AIDS epidemic. For more information on ACT UP’s current activities, see their website www.actupny.org.)

The ACT UP Oral History Project brings lengthy and completed video testimonials about the 1980s and 1990s into our ever-moving present with its new and different needs and feelings (built as they might be on our needs and feelings of the past). In the 1980s and 90s, Jean Carlomusto was perhaps the pre-eminent mover of AIDS video activism at both ACT UP and GMHC (where I made several AIDS documentaries with and/or for her, including Living with AIDS: Women and AIDS, 1987). On the ACT UP Oral History website she is interviewed in 2002 about making AIDS documentary video in the 1980s (the transcript is also included online as a PDF). You can watch her testimony as you will (right now, in your time, on another screen). There she says, in medium close-up talking head: I surprised myself: I found myself at one point using the camera as a weapon and pushing people, mostly cops, out of the way to get to the people in the streets and to shoot this. It was such an amazing thing. I had gone through so many different events. It was the same modality: performer/audience. Here all the boundaries were erased. It was sidewalk/street and people inhabiting either of these places were moving around. It was exciting. And powerful.

Carlomusto’s most recent documentary video, Sex in an Epidemic (2010) also documents lost moments, amazing actions, and our past videos. And yet, with all of this video activity, we worry nonetheless that the precision and power of our actions will be forgotten: that our tapes are too few, their archives too marginal, our stories outdated, the force of the now too complete. And so we build ever more digital homes for our camera memories, as much to remind people of cameras’ and their documented peoples’ power for us now, in the present, as to remember our video feelings of the past. We want to spread the word and feeling and power of activism. Just so, in her 2012 personal email conversation about this essay, Ghosh builds upon and with its metaphors, images, and ideas. She performs the doing of AIDS writing within activist intellectual community: Given that the AIDS crisis is now a pandemic, the memories of activism are part of the antidote and documentary technologies a part of the “network” that will fight an expanding viral network. Hence, the kind of non-linear, spreading connections, the

324

Alexandra Juhasz

archiving and disseminating you perform is not only relevant to our U.S. context. (I speak from experience in the Indian context, where HIV activists find the resplendent artwork of the 1980s activism useful as prophylactic media). If Wojnarowicz and Galas once screamed “unclean,” to sonically transmit living with AIDS beyond the East Village, today we actually have the technologies to spread vital arterial memories, facts, doings.

We do the best we can with the technologies at our disposal. Rooms, arteries, bodies, and webs – unlike traditional documentary video – are physical spaces that can both contain and spread live agents like viruses and actions. Broderick Fox (personal email, 2012) wants to trouble this metaphoric scaffolding, used by so many authors to represent and think about HIV/AIDS activism, mourning, and loss: an artery carries away replenished material to a larger organism. It is not a vein (bringing the depleted back to an energy source for replenishment), and it is the channel for transmission, not the vessel … is video the artery or the vessel?

AIDS Artery On the AIDS Artery, the “message from its editor,” Robert Atkins, explains some of the websites’ metaphoric and literal commitments to the spaces of AIDS: Since the last World AIDS DAY, we’ve entered the Third Millennium and are on the brink of the third decade of the AIDS epidemic. The irony is that it’s clearer than ever that there are numerous AIDS epidemics, not just one. For many people with HIV/ AIDS in the developed world, the situation has improved. But not so for the burgeoning populations with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, India, China, and the former Soviet Union. The time-honored axiom that every community has its own AIDS epidemic remains entirely apt.

AIDS has changed over time and across space and media. In its earliest stages, many of which I document here (and documented then), activists fought for governmental and scientific attention to the crisis which did, slowly and eventually bring about medical, policy, and pharmaceutical regimes that allowed AIDS to be experienced under an altered clock: from the death knell of death-sentence to the expanded time of a “managed microbial form that can be restrained” (Ghosh, personal email, 2012). Needless to say, the timelines of AIDS are specific to its many lived places. Digital documentary can hold and connect multiple strands of time, and even place, even as every webpage itself is dated. So, the AIDS Artery, another initiative of the Estates Project for Artists with AIDS, holds an “arts timeline,” “centerpieces” on AIDS activism – including work by Sarah Schulman, Jim Hubbard’s Fever in the Archive, AIDS activist video, and a photographic exercise on Political Activism and Personal Pleasure by Jeff Weinstein – and so much more that I can’t



Digital AIDS Documentary

325

take up the space and time listing it here on paper because that is so much more efficiently done online, through repositories and links. If you scroll down the AIDSArts timeline it lists events, actions, artwork, and deaths of artists from 1981 to 1999, ending with the publication of The Hours (1998) by Michael Cunningham. The site feels eerily locked or clocked into a different temporality. It takes the intrepid reader to deduce that the “About” section (and everything else there) was (last) written in 2001. Fox remarks: “Seems that the site the Artery as it stands online should in fact be called a vein or a blocked artery. :o” (personal email, 2012).

We Were Here, Online Documentaries, rooms, and bodies – unlike arteries – can both contain and spread feelings. We Were Here: The AIDS Years in San Francisco (David Weissman and Bill Weber, 2011) is a traditional documentary that, according to its website’s About the Film page: documents the coming of what was called the “Gay Plague” in the early 1980s. It illuminates the profound personal and community issues raised by the AIDS epidemic as well as the broad political and social upheavals it unleashed. It offers a cathartic validation for the generation that suffered through, and responded to, the onset of AIDS. It opens a window of understanding to those who have only the vaguest notions of what transpired in those years. It provides insight into what society could, and should, offer its citizens in the way of medical care, social services, and community support.

The website for the documentary includes interviews with the director, a Facebook Wall, press/reviews, and a trailer, also held on YouTube. As is always true for the melodramatic mode (Williams, 2003), the camera’s lingering attention to crying, and the swelling sentimental music that feeds those feelings, allows We Were Here to deliver its promised (and anticipated) catharsis through tears. When you watch the feature documentary in a room at a gay and lesbian film festival, the room and audience come alive through sentiment and onto tissue. While the ACT UP Oral History Project is an archive of activism, and the Artery a place for revisiting lost times and actions, We Were Here is all about feeling now. Believe me: there’s no right or wrong way to remember, to memorialize. The open question for activist digital documentary remains what we might want our users to do with these histories, feelings, and memories. Is it possible to move from loss to action, and can digital documentary help to facilitate?

Ira Sachs’s Online Last Address Documentaries can contain and spread history: like a virus that is not lethal, a virus with emotion and intention. Last Address (2010), an experimental documentary that

326

Alexandra Juhasz

gently and lengthily gazes upon the facades of the last homes of NYC artists who died of AIDS, has played in gay and lesbian film festivals around the world and is also a website that allows for more interaction and information by including biographies of the artists it names. Its purpose is to mourn and remember and respect. Its stately flow is the very opposite of virality, at least the digital kind: that fast, ready spread without the time to care for place or context. Our contemporary digital imaginary lauds large numbers and ready flow; AIDS artists and activists understand that “cursory, interrupted, disarticulated” (Fox, personal email, 2012) expressions are not always best suited for our mourning or militancy.

The AIDS Web Digital AIDS documentary grows to carefully encompass a technological network, web, or perhaps, dare I say a “quilt” of feeling, intention, history, respect, and loss.

The AIDS Quilt Touch Project The AIDS Quilt Touch Project Table, according to its successful (2011) NEH Digital Start-Up Grant application, “is an interactive device that enables collaborative browsing of a database of images of panels of The AIDS Memorial Quilt that have been ‘virtually stitched together.’ … The size and form of the device encourages collaborative browsing in public venues.” After receiving funding, the Table was created in 2012 for presentation at the Quilt 2012 Events in Washington, DC that commemorated the thirtieth year of the AIDS pandemic and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. An early “design fiction” for the project that takes the form of an online video posted originally in 2001 (The “Quilty” Table, n.d.) shows an early prototype of the AIDS Quilt Touch Table (at that time called the “Quilty”). The prototype was created by the design-researchers at Onomy Labs (a design-fabrication firm in California that builds cultural technologies) to demonstrate the culture use of (what was then in 2001) an emergent technology – the interactive table. Watch if you will. Children laugh and play as they tip the table and images of the quilt scroll by indefinitely, ad infinitum, taking up more metaphorical space than seems imaginable, even as this actually fits and flies by on a tabletop. The narrator explains: The Onomy Tilty Table consists of a table with an image projected on to its surface. A viewer navigates the image simply by tilting the tabletop. Because the Tilty Table is ideal for viewing large spacialized images, we developed an example of how the Tilty Table could be used for viewing panels of the AIDS memorial quilt. We call this version of the table Quilty. It allows for a viewer to move through an expansive image of the quilt panels that are digitally stitched together just as the real quilt panels are laid out



Digital AIDS Documentary

327

one next to each other in a large area when on display … We are also developing a search function that will allow a viewer to locate an individual panel. We believe this is an evocative experience for viewers of the AIDS memorial quilt who cannot view the actual quilt in its entirety.3

A Connection Crisis “AIDS is a crisis of connections,” according to curator John Chaich (2011) for his online AIDS art show, Mixing Messages, Making Connections. Let me show you a panel of three pieces of AIDS art first connected linearly across a computer screen (Figure 15.2). I found them already so stitched on the webpage for the online AIDS art show we are currently considering, and then transposed them here so you could see them with me.4

The Cut/The Link/The Room: Elegy and Action There is disturbance but also relevance when things from one place and time are connected, linked, or perhaps displaced via technology. With transmission comes the loss of what an artifact of an actuality meant when it was lived in its first space and time. Then again, in the digital era we can lose what a document meant when it was first creatively treated within a linear documentary. Users make digital AIDS documentaries by disturbing discrete objects that were often meant to be watched alone, or in a particular order, and in memoriam: as careful, full, complete, contemplative homages to dead people and lost times. Cutting and pasting (parts of) (video) (quilt) people/panels is as disturbing as it is evocative. Jim Hubbard, an experimental filmmaker, as well as the curator of the Royal S. Marks Collection of AIDS activist video at the New York Public Library and one of

Figure 15.2  This collage was made to promote Visual AIDS’ 2011 exhibition, Mixed Messages, curated by John Chaich at La MaMa Galleria, New York. It was made from images supplied by the artists: John Giorno, Life Is a Killer, 2009, oil on canvas, 12 × 12 inches, courtesy of Max Wigram Gallery and the artist; Nightsweats & T-cells, Annoy Them … Survive, 2011, silkscreen on paper, 17 × 11 inches, courtesy of the artists; General Idea, AIDS, 1987, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 72 inches, courtesy of the artists. Digital collage created by Visual AIDS. Courtesy of Visual AIDS.

328

Alexandra Juhasz

the organizers of the ACT UP Oral History Project, made Elegy in the Streets in 1989, way before all of this digital activism was possible. His silent, 16 mm color film cuts together images of AIDS activism just so: ●●

●●

●●

●●

Marches. The 1980s men walk by his camera. We know most of them are longdead. They are carrying signs and also balloons which they release into the air, the camera following them from street to sky which they pepper like birds cut to Rollerina spins on her skates in her signature fairy costume, and glittery glasses into a camera-burst cut to personal memories caught in black and white reversal of two men in the woods becomes a visit to the AIDS quilt, the cinematography so dark the panels flit into our awareness as squares of light in a black sea, only the horizon breaking the patchwork flow.

Given its necessarily linear structure – it was made as a film after all – Hubbard rubs action against mourning through montage, creating a clash, or perhaps an intellectual or emotional link. An experimental documentarian, Hubbard creatively treats actuality to force a careful, respectful, gentle, and complex ride between militancy and mourning, memorial and memory, anger and love.

Mixing Reality While some contemporary historiography of AIDS activism understands we 1980s AIDS activists as people defiantly opposed to the quilt, our documentary evidence establishes something less linear or total: there are competing, coexisting, and multiple responses to this past actuality. As Deborah Gould (2009: 226) explains, “Direct-action AIDS activists’ criticisms of grieving rituals like vigils and quilt showings were often scathing and laid the ground work for ACT UP’s different approach to grief.” In the 1980s and 1990s, the AIDS Quilt – a memorial that was contemplated, touched, and encountered by many of us via material in very large public spaces – was sometimes chosen as one bad cultural object from which AIDS activists learned to better name what we needed from representation at that time. In 1992, AIDS activist Bob Rafsky (quoted in Gould, 2009: 228) proclaimed: “I’d like to find a few people who have sewn Names Project Quilt panels but now see such a gesture as inadequate. Then, the next time the Quilt is unrolled – with their permission, for all our dead and dead yet to come – I’d piss on it.” In 1989, a different time and place, Douglas Crimp (2002: 131–132) wrote: “Public mourning rituals may of course have their own political force, but they nevertheless often seem, from an activist perspective, indulgent, sentimental, defeatist.” In 2010, a different time and place, an NEH Digital Start-Up Grant application for the Quilty Table claimed:



Digital AIDS Documentary

329

This project explores the use of a mixed-reality interactive experience for the purposes of encouraging cultural remembrance of an epidemic that is as much a part of the present as it is a memory of the past. The design of the technology matches its cultural purpose: to allow for collaborative browsing, discussion, and social remembering based on evocative historical images.

Later still in 2012, some of the project was realized after being successfully funded and became “a suite of digital experiences that were explicitly designed to augment and revitalize awareness of the significance of the AIDS Memorial Quilt,” featured on the National Mall as part of the twenty-fifth anniversary commemoration of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Balsamo reflects upon the actual digital object and experiences, now called the AIDS Quilt Touch Table, Timeline, and app: Arguably, beyond the evident concern for preservation, the primary benefit of the creation of these digital experiences is that they offer opportunities for increased accessibility and visibility of the AIDS Quilt as a living memorial. Given the sheer size of the Quilt and the logistical difficulties associated with displaying it, the AIDS Quilt is difficult to keep in the “public eye.” Online, global, multi-platform access can help keep the Quilt visible. (Balsamo and Literat, 2013)

According to Marty Fink (2013), Robert McRuer projects our metaphoric thinking forward beyond visibility. McRuer also points to the digital archiving of the NAMES quilt as a means to read the quilt as an emblem of disability history. In tracing the parallel histories of the quilt’s construction and the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, McRuer (2005, 56) argues that “because the function of the quilt continues to shift, however, it is even more likely that uses of it in the future will connect it to disability issues, concerns, and histories.”

Accessibility Crisis In a room, but not so well in a book, I can stitch together multiple, competing, and connecting interpretations, representations, and technologies of the AIDS quilt. This is where I’ve been going all along: a paper-bound linear tactic that allows discrete moments and their memories to infect each other. If “AIDS is a crisis of connections,” digital media serves to link, defying forces of nature that might otherwise keep ideas, bodies, memories, or images untouched, disconnected, or maybe uninfected. Vinicius Navarro (2011) read these words at a talk that I attended in a hotel conference room in New Orleans: The question I ask of digital media is … what that record allows for or enables. I am, in other words, less interested in inscription than circulation … [the] burden of referentiality [is] not so much on individual subjects but on what connects them, the relations made possible by the processes through which we create, use, or share new media.

330

Alexandra Juhasz

Following Navarro, I find that I am less interested in digital circulation than in its behavior.

Emotional Behavior AIDS activist Gregg Bordowitz recently wrote: “AIDS is a mindless repetition, an automatic self-reproduction. Emotionless, without conscience or consciousness, inhuman. A force of nature” (2010: 11). Much of the digital documentary work of contemporary AIDS activists and memorialists has been committed to defying the logic of the virus: repopulating feeling, repurposing memory, recirculating activism.

Mourning Identification Oddly enough, to be an activist – part of a collective seeking change in real time and real places – demands a kind of orthodoxy that helps keep your sites straight, your path clear, and your goals focused. Very linear: like a documentary video or a scholarly article. To attend carefully and purely to one set of goals means a blinkered and controlled vision that disallows the noise, and yes even the possible connections, that might otherwise infect you. Recently, AIDS activists from my generation have been revisiting AIDS art from the 1980s, and repopulating our feelings, memories, and contemporary analyses alongside and into these aging materials. For instance, David Roman (2006) has revisited the film Longtime Companion (Norman Renee, 1990), also much criticized in its time for its depiction of a 1980s AIDS devoid of activism and resplendent with feeling: “What were we unable to see, given the near uniformity of the initial critique, which essentially wished for a different film? Is there an alternative activist position that might now be possible in our contemporary readings?” To be a once-activist in the present invites a return to the materials we couldn’t see or use then; a reconnecting, and mourning, through digital media. Just as some of us revisit the quilt or Longtime Companion, Bordowitz has looked back on Group Materials’ image campaign, Imagevirus. Bordowitz continues: “Viral diseases are testaments to a vast cosmological indifference. They prove that nature doesn’t hold individual life too dear. Beings are born, and they die” (2010: 11). I add: forces of nature circulate blindly. Users of digital media circulate glibly. Activators of digital documentary replicate and connect with intention, feeling, and towards action. Matthew Kirschenbaum muses, “A digital environment is an abstract projection supported and sustained by its capacity to propagate the illusion (or call it a working model) of material behavior: identification without ambiguity, transmission without loss, repetition without originality” (2008: 11). Bordowitz goes on to say: “The idea of the virus can be deployed as a tactic” (2010: 12).



Digital AIDS Documentary

331

Gregory Ulmer continues: “An Electronic Rushmore, however, produces a mourning identification that is flexible and diverse rather than one that is carved in stone. An electronic monument is one in which there is a mapping between the individual and the collective” (2006: 14). The Quilty grant application of 2010 moves on: “The point is to enable the circulation of an important historical memorial to a broad audience in public venues. This project illuminates key considerations for the design and construction of the technologies that support collective cultural ‘remembering.’” But Balsamo worries even so: A crucial aspect of the textile Quilt, which is lost in the digital images, is the tangibility and unique texture of the material. Given the impressive stitching and unique materials and memorabilia that adorn many of the panels, the experience of the AIDS Quilt is significantly enhanced by the visitor’s tangible interaction with its surface. The metaphor of the quilt – which represents, as previously mentioned, an essential feature in the aesthetic and cultural symbolism of the AIDS Quilt – is somewhat eroded in the absence of texture. (Balsamo and Literat, 2013)

I use this forward momentum to conclude: Can a quilt be an electronic monument? What are the features of its digital materials?

Stitching AIDS Online Sarah Brophy writes in Witnessing AIDS (2004: 49): “Quilts’ most distinctive characteristics may be: their inclusion and recontextualization of found objects; their production of decorative, symbolic surfaces; their tactile qualities; and their purpose in warming, protecting, and comforting the human body.” What is true for the monumental features of quilts is also definitive of the digital documentary. It can be ripped, broken, misused, just as it can be used to mend. Search for “Southern AIDS Living Quilt” on YouTube and you will find a channel with that name. It houses the testimony of 111 women: ●● ●●

●●

“I think women need to know how to protect themselves.” Click. “I’m 24 and I work here in Washington DC. I work with the young women of color research council. HIV AIDS can’t touch a lot of young people …” Rip. “My name is Vonda Lee and I’m 65 I was diagnosed in 1995. My 50th birthday. Living with HIV is not hard, the same you do with diabetes.” Cut.

Conclusion: A Stitched Reality Experience Digital documentaries allow links and movement across boundaries of time, space, and material. While they at one and the same time both save and also move the past and its lost feelings, dead people, and knowledge, their most critical intervention

332

Alexandra Juhasz

occurs in the present, in living bodies and activist communities that share principles and sometimes rooms. In any place, and dependent upon the user’s hand, digital technology can activate actuality fragments into webs of ideas and feelings. The question for digital documentary is perennial for any activist documentary: how do you move feeling to action? I suggest that we muster and master new media technologies to stitch the extraordinary memorial capacities of the digital with the grief, anger, knowledge, and possibilities of mobility that are only available to bodies in the present. On this page, I hope to stitch these ideas with the extraordinary needs and potentialities of real people, like you, who might experience documentary media together (just not here). Objects that are carefully orchestrated (like analog videos or mall-sized quilts or their hand-held apps) can allow users to encounter together carefully crafted experiences in real time and shared space, together participating in what Castiglia and Reed (2011: 201) describe as “transforming memories into an ideally compassionate subculture.” Only a little later, in their own book-bound encounter with AIDS memorial narratives, monuments, and artwork, including my own Video Remains, and thereby later still engaging with me (and also Jim, whom they, too, knew when we were young), Castiglia and Reed (2011: 185) pen words that express our shared longing for “memorials that are iconic and intangible, inspiring both an experience of loss and a determination to survive and to change the historical conditions that made loss possible.” They remind us that Simon Watney anticipated something similar in his 1994 Imagine Hope: “a highly creative, constantly changing collective memorial.” We best remember together and in conversation. Therefore, as we media mourners of the digital become the new documentarians, our AIDS memorials will best serve us if they can also provide structures for shared navigation, interaction, and community. For, actuality fragments are most useful for activism when reactivated in a room of real people who experience digital media and memory together.

Notes 1 I gave a talk on October 13, 2001, “Remembering AIDS Online,” as part of Concordia University’s 19th Community Lecture Series on HIV/AIDS. 2 The US Defense Department Advanced Research Program (DARPA) models “how to think like a virus”! 3 In 2012, the principal designers, Anne Balsamo and Dale MacDonald (former co-founders of Onomy Labs) had the opportunity to create an updated version of the interactive tabletop AIDS Quilt browser, using a different interactive device, the Samsung SUR40 with Microsoft’s PixelSense. This public interactive was one of three AIDS Quilt Touch Interactive experiences installed on the National Mall in Washington, DC during the Quilt 2012 events. For a description of the AIDS Quilt Touch Digital experiences see Anne Balsamo’s blog, http://www.designingculture.net/blog/?p=1009, accessed July 30, 2014. 4 In the late stages of preparation of this essay for publication in this anthology, I was asked to get permission to use this Jpeg that I had ripped from the Internet. The webpage it had



Digital AIDS Documentary

333

been on was no longer accessible, and I had no idea where the images had come from, who owned them, or who had rights to them. The process of learning this information, initiated because of copyright laws out of touch with the everyday digital practices that are the concern of this article (the moving of things willy-nilly, their unmooring from context, history, and yes ownership), both proved much of what I theorize in the article proper, while also providing me a valuable context that was unavailable to me as I ripped away. The following background was supplied to me by my friend, and colleague, Ted Kerr, Program Manager at Visual AIDS. He found out both where the images had gone and where they had come from, and also remastered the JPEG. His correspondence is included as another example of the connections we can and do make as part of digital AIDS activism. “The exhibition, according to language developed at the time by Visual AIDS and the curator, presented ‘over forty text-based works by visual artists and designers whose reactions to, and connections through, HIV/AIDS reflect the contemporary moment’s tenor on the pandemic.’ For the International AIDS Conference the following year in Washington, Mixed Messages was remounted by Chaich and Visual AIDS, with help from Transformer, at Fathom Gallery. This collage appeared on Visual AIDS’ previous blog that we no longer have access to. For the last six months, I have been working to figure out how to get it back, or at least grab the content from the back end. But a series of issues with passwords, forgotten accounts, etc. have made it difficult. That blog contained unique content that is lost to us now. What is interesting, and something I had not considered is that through people doing screen shots and screen grabs, and through copy/ paste, there may be a fractured archive of the blog across various laptops and drives around the world” (email correspondence with Ted Kerr, May 13, 2014).

References ACT UP Oral History Project, http://www.actuporalhistory.org/about/index.html, accessed July 30, 2014. Artery: The AIDS-Arts Forum, http://www.artistswithaids.org/artery/index2.html, accessed July 30, 2014. AIDS-Arts timeline, http://www.artistswithaids.org/artery/AIDS/AIDS_index.html, accessed July 30, 2014. Balsamo, A. and Literat, I. (2013) Stitching the Future of the AIDS Quilt: The Cultural Work of Digital Memorials. Unpublished essay. Bordowitz, G. (2010) General Idea: Imagevirus. London: Afterall Books. Brophy, S. (2004) Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony and the Work of Mourning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Burton, J. (ed.) (1986) Cinema and Social Change in Latin America: Conversations with Filmmakers. Austin: University of Texas Press. Castiglia, C. and Reed, C. (2011) If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chaich, J. (2011) Mixing Messages, Making Connections. Curator Statement. Visual AIDS, https://www.visualaids.org/projects/detail/mixed-messages-2011, accessed August 18, 2014. Crimp, D. (2002) Mourning and Militancy. In Crimp (ed.) Melancholia and Moralism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

334

Alexandra Juhasz

Eitzen, D. (1995) When Is a Documentary? Documentary as a Mode of Reception. Cinema Journal, 35(1), 81–102. Fink, M. (2013) Two Ghost Stories: Disability Activism and HIV/AIDS. Jump Cut, http:// ejumpcut.org/currentissue/FinkDisabilityAids/index.html, accessed July 30, 2014. Gaines, J. (1999) Political Mimesis. In Gaines, J. and Renov, M. (eds.) Collecting Visible Evidence, pp. 84–102. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gould, D. (2009) Moving Politics: Emotions and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kirschenbaum, M. (2008) Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lopez, A. (1990) An “Other” History: The New Latin American Cinema. In Sklar, R. and Musser, C. (eds.) Resisting Images: Essays on Cinema and History, pp. 308–330. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. McRuer, R. (2005) Disability and the NAMES Project. The Public Historian, 27(2), 53–61. Navarro, V. (2011) Evanescent Presence: Nonfictional Subjects, Indexicality, and New Media. Paper delivered at SCMS. The “Quilty” Table (n.d.) Onomy Labs, Inc., http://www.onomy.com/video/quilty-full.mpg, accessed July 30, 2014. Roman, D. (2006) Remembering AIDS: Reconsidering the Film Longtime Companion. GLQ, 12(2), 281–301. Ryan, M.-L. (1999) Cyberspace, Virtuality and the Text. In Ryan (ed.) Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory, pp. 78–107. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ulmer, G. (2006) Electronic Monuments. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Williams, L. (2003) Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess. In Grant, B.G. (ed.) Film Genre Reader III. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Part VI

Religion

Introduction Religion

Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

Religion is not the first theme that comes to mind when thinking about documentary film or, for that matter, scholarship about documentary. Perhaps we can explain our gross critical lapses because the ethos that undergirds documentary studies (and the rest of this anthology) is much more frequently oriented towards an activist perspective bent on changing the lived world, or concerned with formal experimentations. The world beyond the beyond is simply outside of its ken. It’s not that documentary never approaches the theme, but it isn’t where creative and politically motivated energy seems to most naturally circulate. Scholars have for the most part steered clear of the topic as well, as if even the consideration of it might have infectious properties, stripping us of our post-Enlightenment reason and tipping us instead toward the irrational pull of belief. Religion has almost never been a topic in any visible evidence conference (with exceptions, of course), and to date no book addresses it head on with regard to documentary. When religion has come into the ambit of documentary studies, as in Alisa Lebow’s book First Person Jewish (2008), it is from a critical, historical, aesthetic, cultural, and/or ethnographic position, rather than a spiritual one. If anything, we find an active avoidance of the subject in the contemporary academy, a resistance that verges on antipathy. God is dead, Nietzsche exclaimed more than a hundred years ago, so why would we still concern ourselves with him? Yet, if the events of the twenty-first century are to be taken as emblematic, Nietzsche’s declaration has not been nearly as convincing outside of the secular academy as it has been within it. Perhaps it wasn’t so smart after all to neglect this sphere of cultural influence. There can be no doubt that religion is indeed one of the most compelling forces of our time (as it was in Nietzsche’s) and sorely in need of A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

338

Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

our serious consideration: religious fundamentalism has been on the rise globally and religiously motivated, often sectarian, wars have come to practically define this new century. However we characterize it, belief, zealotry, devotion, blind or otherwise, is not going away any time soon. More than this, however, we were motivated to take on this theme (it was not in the initial list of themes we drew up but was suggested by Michael Renov, the original editor of this theme) because we were convinced there was theoretical potential in pairing two such disparate modalities. If ever there is a rationalist form par excellence, it is documentary. If ever there is a set of filmic practices that contradict the spiritual side of life, it would be those associated with documentary. When documentary approaches the subject of religion at all, it tends to do so in strictly rationalist terms.1 Documenting a movement that involves religious people or religion per se would seem to be as close as most documentarians will come to the issue. In the United States there have been several successful films, for instance, about the Christian Right, a political movement bolstered by the religious zeal of its adherents (Jesus Camp, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2006; With God on Our Side, Calvin Skaggs and David Van Taylor, 2004) or the rise of religious zealotry (Religulous, Larry Charles, 2008). These are documentaries about religion or religious movements, not documentaries engaged in the spiritual quest at the heart of religion. In other words, one could say that documentary traditionally makes factual claims about events in this world, faring less well in the speculative realm. But like all general claims made about the documentary, this omits important contributions to the practice of documentary that challenge its range and scope. Think only of the early documentaries of Werner Herzog, such as his first, Fata Morgana (1971), shot in the otherworldly landscape of the African Sahel with Herzog reciting passages from the Mayan book of the dead. Or his equally mesmerizing Lessons of Darkness (Lektionen in Finsternis, 1992) with the aerial images of the oil fields of Kuwait blazing infernally, invoking religious concepts of hell on earth. Critics have described these films as science fiction (harkening towards the discussion of the documentaries in our section Planet), but couldn’t they be better considered in religious and spiritual terms? Herzog himself has used a distinctly spiritual discourse to describe his aim to elevate the audience in Lessons of Darkness. He says he wants the audience to be placed on a higher level because “Only in this state of sublimity [Erhabenheit] does something deeper become possible, a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual. Ecstatic truth, I call it” (Herzog, 2009). Can his not be conceived of as a documentary pursuit, the pursuit of truth that goes beyond the mere factual? Ecstasy, sublimity, truth, are these not the quests of the spiritually as well as factually minded? We do have precedents of this strain of filmmaking in early cinema and in documentary history. Think only of the Cine-trans state described eloquently by Maya Deren and Jean Rouch, induced in both cases by filming possession rituals. In the history of cinematic experimentation, the Lumière brothers, Joris Ivens, and others in the early days of cinema began the exploration of the ineffable and the intangible through poetic expressions in film. Other, more recent, filmmakers (in addition to

Introduction 339 Herzog) have approached the spiritual dimension in documentary as well. For instance when Alexander Sokurov turns his hand to documentary, which he has done nearly as frequently as Herzog, he too creates a space of meditation and interiority that inclines to the spiritual. In the film Spiritual Voices (Dukhovnye golosa, 1995), for instance, Sokurov makes the visual analogy between a sleeping soldier and the Finnish painter Hugo Simberg’s 1903 painting, The Wounded Angel, subtly alluding to the deeper spiritual life of both of these young men that transcends their impoverished earthly existence. And there are films of Ron Fricke, Baraka (1992, translated as “blessing” or “prayer”) and his follow up Samsara (2011) which, for all of their technical wizardry and visual fanfare are meant to be meditations on the sacred and the profane. Also of interest are the less flashy, more somber and reflective experimental films of Nathaniel Dorsky, whose “documentaries of one’s own being”2 are created not to represent some “thing” but to represent being itself, in all of its mystery. Yet all of these films raise concerns that documentary studies has been surprisingly quiet about, except perhaps for Jesse Lerner and Alexandra Juhasz’s tongue in cheek conclusion to their anthology on fake documentaries, which notes how, in fact, the curious quest of spiritualist photography, to document the ineffable, has long haunted documentary and documentary studies even as we may turn our gaze from such hocus pocus. An area that documentary studies has never shied away from, however, is ethics: a domain close to the heart of documentary concerns, usually conceived of in terms of responsibility and relationality. And yet, the ethical domain engaged as it is with issues of “the good” and “the right” has almost never been explored on religious terms within the documentary studies context. For instance, many authors think about documentary through the work of Emmanuel Levinas but rarely take on the larger implications of his writing, that is founded in a religious, and indeed a specifically Jewish ethical code. What would it mean to take these concepts on their own terms? To consider, when using the theories of specific (religious) authors, where their convictions may come from? Is there any engagement of the ethical – as a concept or as a code – that is free of religious implications? When thinking of religion as engaging something outside of institutional or material practices – a spirituality that is more aligned with issues of subjectivity and identity – we can imagine another potential fit with documentary studies. Religion attempts to capture or represent that which defies explanation, and that is fertile ground for a great deal of theorizing in the West, and the East. When we talk about haunting and spectral presences, for instance, much of the language used could be associated with religion, but we tend to secularize it and place this within other frameworks, including those of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and philosophy. What if these debates were to be repositioned back into their spiritual domains? Given this spotty background, you may find that the essays in this section surprise or defy expectations as to what documentary studies might have to say with regard to the theme of religion. There are no essays about the US Christian evangelist movement or Muslim fundamentalists in the Middle East. In fact two of the three essays (Angelica Fenner’s and Dean Wilson’s) are about filmic manifestations

340

Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

of Buddhist teachings, both demonstrating precisely this affinity that documentary film can have with spiritual themes, methods, and ways of knowing and being. But the third essay, by Raya Morag, takes a look at an arena that may point precisely to why documentary studies has shied away from religion as a theme: the embrace by the Israeli religious Right of documentary filmmaking for their own political purposes. It is crucial that we face the fact of the emergence of this type of documentary practice, not just in Israel but everywhere (think of Christian Right videos like Geert Wilder’s Fitna, Netherlands, 2008). Documentary’s intent on changing the world – in some sense the focus of this entire anthology – is here found to mobilize its authoritative discourse to propagate religiously motivated antipathy, hate, and violence. While these motives do not define the modus operandi of most of the other films discussed in this collection, we thought it important to include some consideration of this “world changing” direction as well.

Notes 1 See, e.g., a film like Hellbound (Kevin Miller, Canada, 2012), made by a declared Christian exploring the concept of Hell as seen by clerics and lay people alike, or the more skeptical The God Who Wasn’t There (Brian Flemming, US, 2005). 2 Filmic Light: The Serene Beauty of Earthly Experience, an interview with Nathaniel ­Dorsky. Lux, http://lux.org.uk/blog/filmic-light-serene-beauty-earthly-experience-interviewnathaniel-dorsky, accessed July 31, 2014.

Reference Herzog, W. (2009) On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth. Arion, 17(3), 1–12, available at http://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2010/03/Herzog.pdf, accessed July 31, 2014.

16

Rising in the East, Sett(l)ing in the West

The Emergence of Buddhism as Contemporary Documentary Subject Angelica Fenner

Buddhism and Documentary: Elective Affinities The majority of world religions can be said to be faith-based, meaning their traditions and institutional structures are anchored in a set of doctrines to which followers are expected to unconditionally subscribe. Buddhism has evolved into a religion with a body of scriptures and rituals like any other. However, as the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, His Holiness the Dalai Lama has asserted, “scriptural authority cannot outweigh an understanding based on reason and experience” (2005: 24). Buddha himself advised his followers not to accept the validity of his teachings simply out of reverence for him, but instead, to test the truth. Experience must come first, then, the application of reason, and finally, scripture as reference point and continuing inspiration. Buddhism herein distinguishes itself as praxis, encouraging ongoing observation of the world around us and introspection about our encounters in it, towards gaining experiential understanding of self and cosmos (Fielding, 2008: 108). As such, this philosophy displays fundamental affinities with the practice of ­documentary filmmaking, with both domains subject over time to principled reiteration and an increasing heterogeneity of “styles.” Each furthermore references a mode of reception as well as diverse institutional frameworks of production and dissemination (of respectively Buddhist teachings and documentary film). I shall take my cue from John Grierson’s early efforts to identify the specificity of the ­documentary mode, pertaining to “the cinema’s capacity … for observing and selecting from life itself ” (1976: 21). At stake are both a particular object choice, “the living article,” and an approach, “creative work” (21): “You photograph the natural life, but you also, by  your juxtaposition of detail, create an interpretation of it” (22–23). Central A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

342

Angelica Fenner

to  both Buddhism and documentary practice is the role of the observer who, although implicated in the milieu at hand, also “telescopes” it, whether through the technological aid of the camera lens or, alternately, the meditative emptying of one’s thoughts to achieve “beginner’s mind,” freed of preconception or judgment (Suzuki, 2010: 1–2). Both the documentarist and the student of Buddhism are centrally ­preoccupied with questions of discernment in relationship to the phenomenological world. While neither can claim to glean a singular and all-encompassing “truth,” both are preoccupied with the perceptual processes that facilitate claims to localized truth and insight about the human condition in all its psychological and cultural complexity. This technique of “telescoping” is motivated, in both instances, by a certain “epistephilia,” a craving to know and understand. Far from being a blind drive, this desire is mobilized by a certain moral imperative – a conviction that greater understanding of the world and of the human condition, in particular, contributes to the betterment of humanity, that is, to collective enlightenment. Film practitioners, audiences, and Buddhists alike become “students of life,” led to the recognition that engagement with the world is an intersubjective endeavor, bearing concrete consequences for all participants and, thus, necessitating an ethics of conduct. In documentary, this may involve consideration for what Bill Nichols has coined “axiographics” (1991: 77–78), or the ethical implications of mapping space, including the limitations of the frame; the spatial rhetoric created through editing; the relation established between observer and observed through the camera’s gaze and that of the social actors, and so forth. Also pertinent are questions of truth and accuracy in the use of re-enactment (Winston, 2005); informed consent from film subjects; the filmmaker’s search for justice on- and offscreen; upholding freedom of speech for the documentary project itself as much as for those who speak before the camera; concern for the long-term impact of the filming process on its participants, and for wider repercussions not anticipated and beyond the filmmaker’s control. For the Buddhist practitioner, in turn, a code of truthful and ethical conduct emerges out of acknowledgement of the so-called Four Noble Truths, which formed the basis for the Buddha’s first sermon in 528 bce upon attaining enlightenment (Tsering, 2005). The First Noble Truth asserts that all sentient life forms are unavoidably subject to suffering or dukkha. The Pali word has both metaphysical and material implications, translating also as ‘incapable of satisfying” or “impermanent, always changing” – not least due to illness, loss, and ultimately, death. The Second Noble Truth, pariyatti, maintains that the reason we suffer is because we desire: we develop attachments, which invariably lead to loss and disappointment due to their inherently impermanent nature. The Third Noble Truth, however, reveals that it is possible to overcome suffering through nirodha, the unmaking of sensual craving and of conceptual rigidity and grasping. Fourthly, this path towards the cessation of suffering, Buddha discovered through experimentation, travels a middle ground between self-indulgence (hedonism) and self-mortification (asceticism), all the while cultivating compassion and respect for all sentient life forms. This latter stance correlates with the empathic objectivity valorized by documentarists cognizant of



Rising in the East, Sett(l)ing in the West

343

using the camera not to entrap social actors, but rather, to reveal the complexity of the human condition and of the wider world. Documentary practice and the Buddhist approach display further affinities in their relationship to posterity. By way of example, consider how the Buddhist path towards self-understanding can be facilitated through the meditative practice known as samatha, involving individualized focusing techniques such as mindfulness breathing or invocation of a particular mantra (Shankman, 2008). These techniques aid in the overcoming of ego-consciousness, a process that continues across lifetimes, into the cumulative history of humanity. Within a worldview that regards all life as ultimately interconnected, the individual’s gradual illumination invariably bears beneficent repercussions for others. The labors of the documentarist can be read as proceeding in analogous fashion, focalizing actuality through the camera lens and gradually accumulating footage – stored on film, tape, or hard drive – to be reviewed and culled at some potential future juncture for its usefulness in shaping a narrative framework specific to the filmmaker’s worldview. The resulting work, however, also becomes part of a broader visual archive that continues to circulate. As such, the notion of “an afterlife” gains new definition in reference to those individuals who appear on film and to the film material itself: both may, through repurposing of excerpted footage, appear in new “incarnations.” Vivian Sobchak’s phenomenological reading (1999) of the non-fiction film experience, following on that of Jean-Pierre Meunier (1969), further outlines how spectators funnel these impressions through their ‘lateral” and “longitudinal” consciousness, variously reviewing and reframing these “visions” on the basis of identifications anchored in personal experience as well as in broader knowledge of historical context and the world at large. If I have elaborated in some detail potential epistemological affinities between the documentary mode and Buddhist philosophy, it is because these offer one means to understand the implications for Buddhism itself of the international media currency it has attracted over the past 30 years, which has transformed the spiritual practice and expanded its geographical reach far beyond its origins in northern India. Documentary, as a mode of knowledge production, has contributed to shaping a specifically Western understanding of this Eastern cultural tradition, which, up until the Cold War era, had remained geographically sequestered. In ensuing subsections, I outline the scope of some of these filmic interventions, before turning to a singular work by American documentarist Jennifer Fox, herself a practicing Buddhist, to examine in closer detail how film form and spiritual practice mutually elucidate one another in her recently released My Reincarnation (2011).

Screening Lamaistic Buddhism in Tibet The historical figure known as Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563–483 bce) was a bodhisattva, someone devoted to bodhicitta, the achievement of omniscient Buddhahood (Trikaya) for the benefit of all sentient beings. He attained enlightenment at age 35,

344

Angelica Fenner

emerging from 49 days of meditation as a Buddha, an awakened being who need no longer navigate karmic lessons through rebirth. His teachings, the dharma, have spread across East and Southeast Asia, rendering Buddhism the fourth most prevalent world religion. While there are certainly distinctions to be made between Buddhism’s diffusion in, for example, Japan, where it has blended with Shinto, or in Taiwan, where it cohabits with Daoism, I will be preoccupied in this essay with the lamaistic version prevalent in Bhutan, Tibet, Nepal, and Mongolia. This culturally specific iteration first began to gain wider international attention following China’s devastating invasion of Tibet during the Battle of Chamdo in 1950, in which more than 5,000 Tibetans perished (Laird, 2006: 201). Intent upon subjugating Tibet, which remained essentially a pacifist theocracy led by the Dalai Lama, the Chinese set about eradicating the country’s cultural and spiritual inheritance. Between 1959 and 1961, Chinese militia systematically destroyed the 6,524 monasteries in existence, appropriating their resources and religious artifacts and murdering, maiming, or dispersing their inhabitants (Craig, 1992: 125). Today, only 12 monasteries remain in operation, and more Tibetan monks live outside Tibet – in neighboring countries and several Western nations – than within its borders. The increasing media attention devoted to Tibet has paralleled the rising profile of the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, who fled in 1959 amidst the Tibetan Uprising and settled in Dharamsala, India. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his efforts to achieve peaceful reconciliation with China. Several ensuing Hollywood blockbusters – Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1993), Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (1997), and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Seven Years in Tibet (1997) – banked on the epic nature of Tibet’s plight and the exoticism of this East/West encounter, rendering the rituals and beliefs associated with “the land of snow” in vernacular terms for mass consumption. They exemplify only one of the ways Tibetan spiritual tenets and customs have undergone assimilation and appropriation within Western popular culture, including in New Age industries. Indeed, throughout its history, Asian Buddhism, although emerging out of premodern cultural traditions, has been subject to a complex web of influences in the various countries to which it has spread. As David McMahan points out in The Making of Buddhist Modernism, “elements of Buddhism many now consider central to the tradition – meditation, internal experience, individual authority – are so constructed because of the gravitational pull of modernity” (2008: 44). At one time, contemplative practice existed as only one element within an otherwise communal life including social obligations and interdependencies. Yet in contemporary industrialized nations of both the East and the West, these rituals and practices have been selectively coopted into postmodern self-help stress reduction programs – spas, wellness centers, yoga studios, meditation retreats – many of which are less intent upon challenging the alienations of noncommunitarian late capitalism than upon adapting their acolytes to an atomized existence of docile consumption. However, one need not go so far as sempiternal Sloterdijkian kynicist Slavoj Žižek, who has proclaimed: “New Age ‘Asiatic’ thought … from ‘Western Buddhism’ … to different ‘Taos,’ is now establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism” (2001: 12). For despite reservations, some



Rising in the East, Sett(l)ing in the West

345

traditionalist Buddhist devotees may hold about certain developments, the Dalai Lama has publicly maintained on many occasions that it was historically necessary for the teachings from Tibet to enter into widespread circulation, lest they die out altogether. The parallel surge in Western documentaries about Tibetan Buddhism has herein sometimes delivered on one of the medium’s earliest imperatives, that of salvage ­ethnography, by archiving sacred teachings and practices still actively in use in Tibet, and preserving for posterity traditional cultures vanishing amidst aggressively enforced Chinese “modernization.” Some films recall the structure of the ethnographic travelogue memorialized in early exemplars such as Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (US, Merian Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack, and Marguerite Harrison, 1925). For example, The Saltmen of Tibet (Germany/Switzerland, Ulrike Koch, 1997) follows four men from a nomadic tribe as they undertake their annual pilgrimage to a sacred salt lake to gather salt they sell for their economic livelihood. Other films undertake political advocacy, exemplified in Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion (US, Tom Peosay, 2003), shot across 10 years of repeated visits to Tibet, Nepal, and India. It offers a concise overview of the last five decades of devastation via translated interviews, historical footage, and photographs, and uses voice-overs by high-profile Hollywood actors Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Ed Harris. Both the remote location of many monasteries in arid high-altitude regions ­considered uninhabitable by those not acclimated, together with the emphasis on ascetic isolation from material and social distractions of the wider culture, long conspired to prevent closer observation of these closed and highly ritualized ­ ­societies. There was, and remains, concern about the manner in which especially the most sacred teachings, the Dzogchen, might be misinterpreted by those not properly inculcated with years of training and apprenticeship. For this reason, documentary cameras were shunned as instruments of possible misinterpretation that would ­perpetuate a facile and reductive notion of spiritual tenets and of the various yogic habits and bodily regimes implemented by those engaged in extensive sitting meditation. The narrator of Jeffrey Pill’s The Yogis of Tibet: A Film for Posterity (US, 2002), for example, acknowledges the unprecedented access gained, while also stressing that the yogic postures demonstrated should not be imitated by lay persons lest they injure themselves. North American educational documentaries released in the decades prior to and following the millennium have adopted the series or “compendium” format reminiscent of an encyclopedia, variously chronicling in several “volumes” the history of Buddhism via voice-over narration with the visual aid of staged enactment, or parsing different facets of its philosophy in a comparative framework with other world religions.1 Others target contemporary monastic traditions, often underscoring their mysticism and otherworldliness as a source of potential fascination for secularized Western audiences. Werner Herzog’s Wheel of Time (Germany, 2003), for example, seems congruent with the director’s elusive quest throughout his oeuvre to capture on camera what he calls “the absolute, the sublime, and the ecstatic truth” (Herzog, 2010). Oracles and Demons of Ladakh (US, Rob McGann, 2003), in turn, explores the northwest province of India, the Tibetan Plateau in the Himalayas thus

346

Angelica Fenner

far spared Chinese encroachment. The region maintains all four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, and its practitioners are believed to have direct contact with spirits, with whom they communicate through the Oracles for the purposes of divining the future, warding off harmful influences, or curing disease. The invariably orientalist pitfalls of the topic, and those structured into the chiasmatic encounter between Western film crew and Eastern protagonists, become an almost preternatural hazard exemplified by Vajra Sky Over Tibet, the third film in the Yatra Trilogy Journey into Buddhism (US, John Bush, 2004), which is structured as a pilgrimage traversing the Himalayas to tour temples and monasteries, including Jokhang Temple and the Potala Palace, former home of ruling Dalai Lamas prior to its purging and occupation by the Chinese. Other documentaries explore monastic life from a subjective point of view, using self-reflexivity to underscore the radical contrast between these religious communities and secular post-industrial modernity. Notably, Victress Hitchcock’s Blessings: The Tsoknyi Nangchen Nuns of Tibet (US, 2009) shadows a group of America women who speak openly about surrendering material comforts in order to travel to a remote cloister in Eastern Tibet, whose members survived the decimation of the 1960s by continuing their practice in remote caves; they recently singlehandedly rebuilt one cloister stone by stone as a haven for nuns ranging from girlhood to the most elderly. Aligned with this move to demystify and render more accessible monastic subjectivity are also the numerous documentaries “starring” H.H. the Dalai Lama.2 The promotional blurbs accompanying these documentaries invariably promise “rare behind-the-scene glimpses” into the private life of, in the end, a strikingly simple and humble man, whose impishly contagious laugh has become coupled with the wisdom born of an epic life story and the huge moral responsibility he freely carries. His participation seems motivated in equal measure by humanitarianism, that is, his desire to exemplify the Buddhist path of compassion (he is, after all, the Buddha consciously made manifest), and by activism, to raise awareness about the continuing political and religious persecution endured by Tibetans in their occupied homeland. This mission is also pursued more anonymously through journalists, filmmakers, local residents, and tourists using cameras and cellphones to track and distribute explicit evidence of human rights violations in Tibet. The website FreeTibet.org is one of several using the Internet as platform for activism and resistance. Just recently, on June 11, 2012, China took the step, not for the first time, of closing Tibet’s borders to all foreign travelers, ostensibly to protect tourists from Tibetan “terrorism,” but thereby blocking international access to visible evidence of a traumatized indigenous population. Symptomatic of that trauma are the wave of over 100 self-immolations by Buddhist monks and nuns which began in February 2009 in protest against their forcible repression, and which have drawn renewed media attention to Tibet’s dire plight.3 As of March 14, 2011, the Dalai Lama also formally stepped down as head of the Tibetan government-in-exile, herein ceding the political power he and his predecessors wielded for centuries. While he continues to serve as spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, he has made clear that he will not reincarnate again



Rising in the East, Sett(l)ing in the West

347

within Tibet, if at all, if the Chinese act upon their putative claim to jurisdiction over the appointment of the next Dalai Lama. This rupture from a lamaistic tradition retracing to the fourteenth century has been further radicalized by the 80-year-old’s intimations that, should he choose to reincarnate, he may return as a woman, providing clear written instructions when the appointed time approaches, to ensure against the possibility of mistaken identity.4

The Semiotics of Reincarnation The lamaistic tradition of the so-called tulku lends specificity to the Tibetan iteration of Buddhism and offers a compelling point of entry into my exploration of the analogical underpinnings of film form and Buddhist philosophy. The term tulku roughly translates as “the manifested-body” or “incarnation, reincarnation, rebirth” (Thondup, 2011: 1) and, for our purposes, refers to an enlightened master who can choose the manner of his/her rebirth, as well as the context and geographical location. Having achieved freedom from the suffering that comes from egocentric ignorance, this being chooses to continue to remanifest in human form in order to extend the blissful energy of compassion to others still caught up in misknowing and suffering. Tulkus play a central role as standard-bearers of the Tibetan Buddhist ­tradition, providing spiritual and social guidance to the ordained and to laity alike. The Dalai Lama represents a very specific tulku lineage, that of the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokitesvara, who manifested through Gendum Drup, the very first Dalai Lama in the fourteenth century. Although there are presently about 500 tulkus scattered across Tibet, prior to the Chinese invasion it is estimated there were a few thousand (Thundup, 2011). While all Buddhist cultures accept the biological theory of karma and regard rebirth as commonsense, only the Tibetan and Mongolian cultures have institutionalized the reincarnation of enlightened lamas. Over the centuries, meticulous protocols have been developed for locating, recognizing, enthroning, training, and venerating the tulkus. Since the 1970s, they have also begun to be identified in various countries of the expanding Tibetan diaspora. The elaborate process of locating and verifying the identity of a child as that of tulku can involve reference back to details previously provided by a lama on his deathbed. Before dying, lamas have been known to identify the geographical location of their next rebirth or reveal the appearance of their future parents’ house. Alternately, signs may be sought in the cremated remains of the ascended master: the direction in which the smoke rises may signal the direction of travel towards his rebirth, as may the direction the charred skull shifts to face. A Tibetan astrologer may also be consulted for calculations that indicate, for example, the first letter of the name of the reincarnated child’s father or the village where he was born. Something about the very concept of willful reincarnation and the attendant search for material signs of its occurrence is hauntingly reminiscent of the photographic process, based as the latter is upon what has come to be referred to as an

348

Angelica Fenner

indexical relationship in which the object filmed (“the referent”) leaves a direct physical imprint or “trace” on the photographic plate or negative, thereby producing the (culturally coded) sign. The human soul can be read, in analogous fashion, to harbor an indexical relationship to the new body in which it reincarnates. It may even “imprint” the new body with traces of its previous earthly existence. For example, birthmarks, scars, or genetic abnormalities present in a young tulku have been found to closely correlate with injuries they are known to have received in the prior lifetime, including those that may have been the cause of death. The body may even be imprinted with neurological memory traces such that the young child accurately recognizes by name older individuals (complete strangers) known from the earlier lifetime. Some tulku also speak the dialect of their earlier birth rather than that of the region of their current incarnation, despite having learned speech exclusively within their most recent biological family. Especially relevant to this discussion is the theory of signs first developed by American philosopher Charles Peirce, which has been highly influential for photographic and documentary theory, and which essentially constitutes a philosophy of experience that bases its logic on observation of the material, phenomenological world. Extrapolating from Peirce’s semiosis to the Tibetan system for identifying a tulku, a reincarnated master may be recognized in a young child’s body on the basis of a relationship between referent and sign that is not only indexical, as illustrated by the aforementioned bodily correlations, but also iconic, for example the child correctly recognizes his old prayer beads, prayer wheel, or chalice from among a collection of otherwise similar artifacts. That relationship may even be said to be symbolic, for when a two-year-old child replicates speech patterns or the dialect of an earlier lifetime, this involves not only indexical imprinting of the cerebral cortex and muscular patterning of the tongue that speaks, but also mastery of language as a signifying system. Indeed, the iconic and the symbolic actually inhere in the indexical relationship itself, given that the latter “imprint” or sign generally (although not necessarily) bears some isomorphic relationship to its original referent, while also involving symbolic/analytical labors on the part of the “interpretant” (Peirce, 1940: 99). The latter is crucial, since the significance of any sign can only be constituted through a culturally informed act of interpretation. Peirce’s understanding of the interpreter as ultimately constituted through an entire system of cultural interpretants finds an apt corollary among the Tibetan delegation tasked to correctly identify a tulku – an assembly comprised of highly trained individuals, including the deceased lama’s devout pupil, other lamas (including the Dalai Lama himself), and astrologers conversant in the system of interpretation. Their system of divination effectively accords with Peirce’s take on “the real,” which he famously summated as, “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality” (1878: 300). In this regard, the search for indexical signs of the tulku’s authenticity redoubles a central concern of documentary as representational art. Is that which is captured on



Rising in the East, Sett(l)ing in the West

349

film the real thing? What are we really looking at, and how is its veridical status and actuality to be ascertained? These questions haunt not only the film spectator, given his/her limited access to the production conditions and circumstances surrounding extant footage, they also fixate the filmmaker, who scrolls through hours of film material in search of kernels of local “truth” embedded amid not only the most captivating excerpts, but also “dead” moments and conflictual visible evidence that defies anticipated outcomes. As any documentarist will concede, the more one tries to fix the terms of “the real,” the more illusory it begins to appear. This is also a central tenet of Buddhist philosophy: our present reality, compelling as it may seem, is actually grounded in a world of perception that beguiles, deceives, and remains innately illusory. Sense perception binds the body, shapes it, and controls and interprets input and output. This is the world of samsara, of desire, of lust and loss, of cause and effect, of acquiring karma and then burning it off again through repeated cycles on the wheel of life. Certainly, cinema overall, as industry, institution, and unique mode of sensorial engagement, has long served to reinforce this sense of the fantasmal and illusory nature of desire via the screen’s structuring play of absence and presence, of narrative dramas of loss and recovery. The notion of industrial film production as “dream factory” (Ehrenburg, 1931) further underscores the medium’s ability to facilitate escape from reality. Buddhism, by contrast, claims that worldly existence itself is the dream, and that “waking up” consists of recognizing and coming to terms with its illusory and ephemeral nature. These two takes on dream life and waking life appear, on first glance, to invert one another’s mechanism of disavowal: the spectator caught up in the larger than life drama on the screen reminds herself, “it’s just a movie,” and thereby mimics the striving student (or bodhisattva) fleetingly lost in the lure of human existence, who in turn reminds himself, “life is but a dream.” Life and art herein attain a certain equivalence in their illusory status. The ontological claims of documentary, as a very particular art form, get superseded by a recognition that to observe the world is to observe illusion, and, by coming to understand it as such, also partially to transcend it. Documentary’s traditional association with the ideals of the Enlightenment project, of achieving a better understanding of the world through its close observation and reasoned reflection, may herein assume a new spiritual inflection.

Tracking Tulku Mainstream American cinema has broached the revelation processes associated with the tulku with a degree of fascination, first spoofing them in the Eddie Murphy comedy, The Golden Child (Michael Ritchie, 1986) and then re-enacting them as historical drama in Scorsese’s Kundun (1997). The latter chronicled the early “discovery” of the 14th Dalai Lama and his flight into exile, using lay actors and casting his real-life nephew, Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong, for scenes of his adulthood. Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1994), in turn, offered a fictional account of the search by

350

Angelica Fenner

monks from a Bhutan monastery (including a performance by real life Lama Sogyal Rinpoche) for the child who is the rebirth of a great Buddhist teacher, Lama Dorje. By film’s end, they locate three simultaneous “emanations,” in an American boy in Seattle and in two Nepalese children. Bertolucci’s storytelling was influenced by the first American documentary to track a tulku: Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam’s The Reincarnation of Khensur Rinpoche (1991). The latter chronicles a 47-year-old monk’s search for the reincarnation of his ascended spiritual master, Khensur Rinpoche. After an impish four-year-old has been recognized by both the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan State Oracle, the film closes on scenes from the moving relationship developing between the erstwhile disciple and his young master. The more recent documentary Unmistaken Child (Israel, Nati Borat, 2008), similarly follows stages of the divination process: preparing the corpse of Geshe Lama Konchog for cremation, examining his ashes for signs, astrologically calculating the location of the village of his rebirth, “interviewing” diverse children in the remote Tsum Valley near the Tibetan border, and finally, locating the tulku amidst a Nepalese peasant family who, although deeply honored to have ushered an enlightened being into the world, can also be seen to silently suffer at surrendering their child to lifelong residence in a monastery far from their village. In turn, the autobiographical documentary Tulku (Canada, 2009) was produced by Canadian-American tulku, Gesar Mukpo, born in Berkeley, California in 1973 to exiled Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (himself the 11th Trungpa tulku) and his British wife, Diana Mukpo. Chögyam Trungpa, who died in 1987 when Gesar was 13 years old, gained prominence during his short but fulsome bohemian life in the West as founder of the first Buddhist university, the Naropa Institute in Colorado. His son Gesar was identified at age three by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche as the reincarnation of one of Chögyam Trungpa’s teachers, Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche from Shechen, Tibet and was promptly enthroned in Berkeley. At age 15, he journeyed (or “returned”) to the Shechen Monastery in Nepal to study Tibetan but left after a year due to homesickness. In lieu of later attending college, he traveled to the refugee colony of Bir, India to study with Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, a tulku who had studied filmmaking at NYU after serving as consultant on Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, and who went on to direct the features The Cup (Bhutan, 1999) and Magicians and Travellers (Bhutan, 2003) and also appeared in the documentary Words of My Perfect Teacher (US, Lesley Ann Patten, 2003). In his mid-30s, Mukpo gained funds from Canada’s National Film Board to explore his own experience and that of other young men born in the West and identified in childhood as tulku. During shooting, he also revisited his mentor in India to converse on the merits and drawbacks of continuing the tulku system in the ­diaspora amid transformations in lifestyle, mobility, and tradition. The resulting film opens on a view of a computer screen, where Mukpo, who now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has been editing images for a music video. Rap music sourced in the computer initially saturates the diegetic space as the camera pulls back to reveal a bearded man in a black T-shirt and the low-hanging jeans that have become the ­signature attire of male youth fashioning themselves after rap industry icons. His



Rising in the East, Sett(l)ing in the West

351

tone of voice and habitus in this opening scene and, more incongruously, in later footage in northern India, offer striking evidence of cultural drift from the traditional Tibetan socialization of a tulku. Interviews with fellow 20-something Westerners identified as tulku include his own brother Ashoka Mukpo, who works for Human Rights Watch in New York, and with Canadian Dylan Henderson, whom Mukpo’s father identified back in 1975 as the incarnation of one of his teachers and who was the first (fully) Caucasian tulku found in the West. Also included are fellow San Francisco native, Wyatt Arnold, spending a year studying Tibetan in India, and Reuben Derksen, born in Amsterdam in 1986 and raised in Nepal and Bhutan, recognized at age 11. The latter is the most cynical among the interviewees, due to negative experiences at the monastery in India where he lived for three years following high school. Overall, the disparate discussions reveal less about the original tulku tradition or its implementation in the West than about the discrepancy between the material privileges these Western men possess and the austere living conditions and devotional commitment to humanity embraced by their “predecessors.” The “slacker” look the younger generation cultivates creates an affective dissonance most particularly in scenes shot against the backdrop of northern India; jetting in and out of the country on the basis of their privileged titles, these Western tulku nonetheless openly question the value of Tibetan monastic culture and scoff its traditions as empty and meaningless ritual. Singularly absent is any reflection upon their own surprising display of cultural solipsism. As in so many North American documentaries shot abroad, the local population gets reduced to scenic backdrop for the existential malaise of Western protagonists whose self-absorption assumes center stage. It is difficult to overlook Derksen’s deprecating tone as he openly professes he doesn’t consider himself Buddhist, but simply returns to Bhutan once a year to officiate at ceremonial events “because it makes these people so incredibly happy.” Mukpo, in turn, travels the economically modest region on a shiny new moped bearing a vanity license plate that reads “TULKU.” If these young men are indeed tulku, something they themselves place in question, their spiritual inheritance has not rendered them immune from the inimitable posturing so prevalent in consumer-driven societies. The most recent documentary to explore the Western tulku, Jennifer Fox’s My Reincarnation, premiered at Toronto’s HotDocs Film Festival in 2011 and continues to screen to wide acclaim among audiences worldwide. It possesses both archival value for the content of the footage and artistic merit for its heightened reflexivity at the level of film form. A master of the longitudinal documentary, Fox has introduced innovations in narration and camera practice with each successive production during her career. Each epic story explores at close range processes of individuation as they occur in tension between families of origin and wider society under culturally specific circumstances.5 My Reincarnation (2011) claims a similarly unique production history. At 82 minutes it is her shortest film, defying our assumptions about the longitudinal form as long on projection length. Yet the footage gathered was also shot over the longest time period, namely 20 years, in the context of Fox’s unusual access to the high Tibetan Buddhist Master, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu.

352

Angelica Fenner

Figure 16.1  Chögyal Namkhai Norbu (left) with Jennifer Fox (right) at the Inauguration of the Shang Shung Institute by H.H. the Dalai Lama at the Dzogchen community in Merigar, Arcidossa, Italy in 1988. Photo by Alex Siedlecki. Courtesy of Jennifer Fox.

In 1989, at age 29, after completing The Last Home Movie, she decided to take a sabbatical from filmmaking and instead took on the informal job of secretary to the Rinpoche who had become her spiritual teacher. However, because filming had become such a routine practice, she soon found herself recording his private life as she accompanied him on his travels around the world (Figure 16.1).

East/West Family Romance Chögyal Namkhai Norbu was born in Derghe, eastern Tibet, in 1938. As a young child, he was recognized as the reincarnation of the great Dzogchen master Adsom Drugpa (1842–1924) and later also as a reincarnation of the very first Dharmaraja of Bhutan, Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal (1594–1651). After completing a rigorous program of religious studies under some of the great masters of his time, including Rinpoche Changchub Dorbe, Norbu fled the deteriorating situation in Tibet, learning only years later that his entire remaining family had perished at the hands of the Chinese. In 1960, at the invitation of orientalist scholar Giuseppe Tucci, he settled in Italy; there, he gradually helped spread Tibetan culture in the West, first working in the IsMEO (Institute for the Middle and Extreme Orient) in Rome and later teaching Tibetan and Mongolian language and literature at the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples, where he still worked until recently. In the mid-1970s, Rinpoche Norbu also began disseminating the Dzogchen, the most



Rising in the East, Sett(l)ing in the West

353

Figure 16.2  Chögyal Namkhai Norbu with wife Rosa, son Yeshi, and daughter Yuchen. My Reincarnation (Jennifer Fox, 2011). Courtesy of Jennifer Fox.

sacred Buddhist teachings about attainment and maintenance of omniscient and timeless awareness. In 1981, prompted by growing public interest, he also founded the Shang Shung Institute, the very first center of the Dzogchen Community, in Arcidosso, Tuscany. Under his mentorship, similar centers have proliferated across almost every continent. Like several other Buddhist masters who fled into exile, Norbu devoted his life abroad to disseminating Tibetan spiritual teachings, but also selectively adapted to Western culture. He met his future wife, an Italian of Catholic faith, at a gallery vernissage and she developed an interest in Buddhism. Together, they raised two children in Formica, Italy, both of whom have integrated their patrimonial cultural and spiritual inheritance amidst a secular socialization in Italy (Figure  16.2). When Jennifer Fox began filming Norbu’s daily routines, she also captured ­elements of family life, including conversations with his son, Khyentse Yeshi Silvano, who was born in Rome in 1970 and was 18 years old when Fox began filming him. Yeshi had been recognized by H.H. Sakya Trizin as the reincarnation of Namkhai Norbu’s maternal uncle, Khyentse Rinpoche Choekyi Wangchug, another famous Dzogchen master, who had died in prison at the hands of the Chinese. However, despite his father’s expectations, Yeshi disavowed this alleged spiritual inheritance and declined to follow in his father’s footsteps as a spiritual master. Born and raised in the West, he was interested in amateur photography, played in a rock band, and planned to attend university. He went on to study ­philosophy at Rome University, then engineering at Bologna, and subsequently worked as a manager and IT business consultant. Fox maintains that when she first started filming she didn’t have a specific project in mind and had no clear idea what she would do with the footage; she was simply

354

Angelica Fenner

filming out of that compulsion familiar to many practitioners, to document come what may. However, she harbored an ideal story of a father-son film, in which the son eventually “wakes up,” recognizes his reincarnation, and returns to Tibet to be enthroned in the monastery that has been awaiting his arrival (or “return”) since prior to his birth. Fox eventually stopped traveling with Namkhai Norbu, put the footage aside, and went on to make other films. Periodically she would visit the family and record more footage, waiting for a story to appear. And it did, a little over a decade later, as Yeshi began having powerful visions he suspected originated in his previous incarnation, as if he was being called forth to take up and continue his great-uncle’s and his own interrupted spiritual mission. Fox, in turn, began deliberating the possibilities for rendering the living tenets of Buddhism into a compelling screen narrative for lay audiences and practitioners alike. Upon its release, My Reincarnation was hailed for demystifying and humanizing the life of an esteemed spiritual master. As such, it can be situated amidst a genealogy of documentary profiles of Buddhist luminaries emerging over the past 25 years, including those made with and about H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama.6 In many cases, prior to or following any given film’s release, the same information also appeared in book form. All too often, the film version is marketed – by blameless publicity agents tasked to maximize distribution – as offering glimpses into “long forbidden” regions, peoples, and rituals, hereby pandering to the voyeurism and exoticism the documentary mode also has a long legacy of facilitating. Yet the audiovisual format is also uniquely equipped to offer visible evidence of what may remain intangible in book form: the palpable aura of compassion many high masters emanate on screen. This may seem to contradict what Walter Benjamin once maintained of the technical reproduction of art: that the loss of presence and singularity leads to a loss of aura, which film and photography compensate through fetishization of the close-up, enhanced by studio lighting and make-up (1988: 236). However, Benjamin’s dialectical reasoning also concedes that the enlargement of the image through the close-up “reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject” (236); he herein references not only physical, but also psychical dimensions of subjectivity along with its location within a social framework. The “luminosity” of many high masters may also be reinforced by the investment we have in the indexical nature of their footage: as Roland Barthes once pointed out with regard to the photograph, it “is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here” (2010: 80). The continued profiling of Buddhist masters in documentary formats will necessarily navigate an uneasy path between what Benjamin described as “the work of art reproduced” – associated with aura and the religious cult – and “the work of art designed for reproducibility.” The latter sheds its ritual value and “begins to be based on another practice – politics” (1988: 224) – and, I would add, economics. It should therefore come as no surprise that Fox’s storytelling humanizes a high Tibetan spiritual master through a secular form familiar to Western audiences: that of the family melodrama richly imbued with classical oedipal tensions and what Freud coined “the family romance” (1959a: 9), the fantasy of the more “normative” family invoked by the adolescent psyche to aid the individuation process. The son’s



Rising in the East, Sett(l)ing in the West

355

Figure 16.3  Khyentse Yeshe Namkhai. My Reincarnation (Jennifer Fox, 2011). Courtesy of Jennifer Fox.

viewpoint is facilitated through frequent use of Yeshi’s voice-over, extracted from conversations Fox recorded over the years, in which he spoke at length about having to be the son of an esteemed master who was always in the public eye. He remarks, “I see my father once each year for three or four days. We talk about something very general. I don’t have a real emotional relationship with my father. My father doesn’t understand the concept of being father and son. He always treats me like the son of a master, not like a father and son of an Italian family” (Figure 16.3). Yet there are concrete historical and cultural origins for his father’s comportment, as Yeshi concedes: “When he was young, he was taken from his parents to a monastery and had to study from four or five in the morning like a master.” Yeshi regards this tradition as anachronistic, countering, “But if we are in Italy, why do we have to act this way?” Arguably, Yeshi’s particular version of the “family romance” poses a dilemma for which no historical precedent exists in the West. Transplanted from their family of origin, Tibetan tulku instead spent their youth in the ascetic environment of the monastery, and went on to lead a celibate life (although isolated exceptions have been recorded over the centuries). They thereby bypassed the unique paternal challenges of raising a biological child of their own, not to speak of one similarly revealed as tulku. Whether Yeshi’s father consciously abnegates traditional family life or simply has no reference point for it, Fox’s footage reveals he is not entirely free of emotional attachments, or “samsara.” As he professes to students of Buddhism gathered in the newly built temple of the Dzogchen community in Arcidosso, Italy: “Samsara is like the ocean and every day we are swimming in that. Some people say, ‘I don’t like to swim.’ But it’s not so easy, because in Samsara we are totally dependent on the emotions. We are attached to people and objects. To be free from Samsara, we should learn how to swim with less attachment and emotion.” Fox originally considered titling her film

356

Angelica Fenner

Figure 16.4  Chögyal Namkhai Norbu swimming. My Reincarnation (Jennifer Fox, 2011). Courtesy of Jennifer Fox.

“Learning to Swim” and retained water as a recurring visual cue, beginning with the opening scene viewed through a camera lens bobbing at the water’s surface, revealing in cutback Norbu Rinpoche floating peacefully. Footage of him in his own pool or at local lakes becomes an oneiric motif throughout the film (Figure 16.4). We see evidence of samsara in a sequence where Yeshi is still 18 years old and preparing to leave home to start his university studies, with no interest in following in his father’s spiritual footsteps. He packs boxes of books to take to college, including the works of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Looking on uneasily, his father remarks, “Do you know what ‘jung’ means in Tibetan? Sugar cane!,” hereby implying that Yeshi’s pursuits are self-indulgent (Figure 16.5). Even a spiritual master struggles to release attachments, most especially that primordial fatherly claim to know what is best for his son and to miss him when he leaves home. Later footage documents Namkhai Norbu’s bout with cancer, which directly confronted him with the duality of mind and body, and left him bloated, often bedridden, and ruminating about his mortality while counting out his daily ration of prescription tablets for blood pressure and other ailments. His own remarks about the release of negativity and karma imply that he eventually overcame the cancer through spiritual introspection and release of karma. Fox’s use of the long form, incorporating footage accumulated across a 20-year span, facilitates reflection upon wider philosophical implications emerging from the epic transcultural migration of Tibetan Buddhism, and of the tulku tradition in particular. Her unprecedented access to family life observed at close range brings into focus a conflict that is both intergenerational and intercultural. While her storytelling builds upon the classic totemic struggle over the paternal signifier already well rehearsed in family melodrama, the Buddhist concept of the precession of souls, or reincarnation, also sublates the traditional oedipal understanding of the unidirectional transfer of power



Rising in the East, Sett(l)ing in the West

357

Figure 16.5  Chögyal Namkhai Norbu watches Yeshe as he packs for college. My Reincarnation (Jennifer Fox, 2011). Courtesy of Jennifer Fox.

from father to son. For Norbu Rinpoche necessarily regards Yeshi not “merely” as his biological son, subservient to him in authority and in life experience, but as, in fact, his former spiritual and biological mentor and ancestor, the reincarnated great-uncle he once knew as Khyentse. He describes how he first learned of this: My son, when he was in his mother’s womb, I had dreams. Some dreams of my uncle Khyentse Rinpoche who was one of my teachers. I went to visit him with my wife. My uncle gave a kind of empowerment and in that moment there is a red light. This red light is dissolving in my wife. Then [in real life] a very important lama in India, the head of the Sakyapa School, he wrote me a letter and he is saying that my son is the reincarnation of my uncle Khyentse Rinpoche. So I wrote him, “Do you mean my uncle has died? Because we don’t know. We don’t have any news from Tibet.” So in my idea, my uncle is still alive in Tibet somewhere. But this Lama, he feels my uncle is dead.

Of his Uncle Khyentse he recalls: He was very good teacher of Dzogchen. But in his life he had many problems with corruption, the monastery, and the bureaucracy. He always escaped from these situations all his life. So I know how my son was in his past life and I don’t want to create anymore these kinds of problems.

Elaborating further, he points out: Generally, when someone is recognized as a reincarnation, they are sent to India for a monastic training. But … I didn’t want to condition Yeshi. If he is the real incarnation of my uncle Khyentse, we should see how he manifests.

358

Angelica Fenner

This scenario radically undermines the conventional psychoanalytic understanding of object relations developed by Freud’s Viennese colleague Otto Rank and further elaborated by the British circle of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and others, who posit psychical dynamics evident in adulthood to be retraceable to parent/child relations developed in infancy and childhood. Object relations in the Buddhist worldview, by contrast, become anchored in an ongoing evolution in understanding one’s subject position and responsibilities from one lifetime to the next, in relation to the same constellation of souls. It becomes less a matter of linear succession, of one generation leading the next forward, than of precession, of rotating around changing points of attachment while collectively progressing towards enlightenment. Cinematic storytelling, and longitudinal documentary, in particular, is ideally suited to outline the radical implications for our understanding of temporality. Ironically, when the younger Yeshi rebuffs the alleged visions of this prominent Lama, he does so by associating them with specifically cinematic irreality: I have what are commonly called “the proofs.” I have the dream many times of a place in Tibet. And then I recognized this place in a photo. A lot of people say, “Yes, this is the proof.” But I don’t take these as a basis for believing. A lot of people look for myths and saints. Why don’t they go to the cinema? I mean, I’m here, I’m living. I don’t want to be the shadow of someone.

And yet, 13 years later, Yeshi’s own experiences would proceed to mimic the operations of the cinema. While he had been busy establishing himself in the corporate world, had married and started a family of his own, his father’s Dzogchen community had continued to grow, and organizational problems arose which Yeshi, with his corporate experience, was well suited to resolve. He began having visions with increasing regularity that beckoned him to take up his spiritual responsibilities, and decided to quit his job and devote himself fully to the teachings (Figure  16.6). Laura Mulvey (2006) maintains that the cinema (as a photographic medium) and the human unconscious both share a privileged relation to time evocative of the mechanism of Nachträglichkeit, termed thus by Sigmund Freud to identify the way the unconscious may preserve a particular experience, but only years later bring its traumatic impact and significance to consciousness when triggered by associative events. While Freud developed this concept in the context of human sexual development, it arguably also bears on individuation processes such as those experienced by Yeshi while consolidating an identity distinct from that of his father or, for that matter, from his own earlier incarnation. Both the cinema and the unconscious preserve the moment at which the image is registered, inscribing an unprecedented reality into its representation of the past. This, as it were, storage function may be an incident lost to consciousness. Both have the attributes of the indexical sign, the mark of trauma, or the mark of light, and both need to be deciphered retrospectively across delayed time. (Mulvey, 2006: 9)

And deciphering the signs is precisely what Yeshi did when he resolved to go to Tibet to fulfill the prophecy that had haunted his childhood, youth, and adulthood.



Rising in the East, Sett(l)ing in the West

359

Figure 16.6  Khyentse Yeshe Namkhai. My Reincarnation (Jennifer Fox, 2011). Courtesy of Jennifer Fox.

Figure 16.7  Khyentse Yeshe Namkhai’s first visit to Tibet. Photo by Luigi Ottaviani. Courtesy of Jennifer Fox.

Flying first to Chengdu, China, he then traveled by jeep towards Eastern Tibet. When he queried his driver as to what the villagers will expect from him, the escort replied, “Take the trip, recognize the people, teach the teachings.” Fox’s camera captures the unfolding rural landscape from the car window as Tibetan pilgrims of all ages line the dirt road, bowing in reverence as the jeep slowly passes (Figure 16.7).

360

Angelica Fenner

Figure 16.8  The egg-shaped structure appearing in Khyentse Yeshe Namkhai’s early dreams  since childhood and which was constructed only three years prior to his arrival. My Reincarnation (Jennifer Fox, 2011). Courtesy of Jennifer Fox.

When Yeshi retroactively reflects back upon this scene in voice-over, he points out that certain key objects in the landscape bore a direct visual correspondence to places seen in dreams he had been having since he was five years old – places he had never visited. He had previously assumed that they referenced a site from his past incarnation; yet now, he remarks: How dumb of me not to understand. That was the future. I discovered that the dreams I had when I was five years old were more about the future than they were about the past, because this small monastery and this egg-shaped temple were built only three years ago.

In effect, the images were “sent” from the future in anticipation of his arrival or “return” (Figure 16.8).

Non-Linear Temporalities Yeshi’s experiences reinforce the thesis that the analogical operations often attributed to both dream work and the cinema also apply to the Buddhist worldview. It is vertiginous, indeed, to contemplate how past, present, and future can fold into one another, as if the human soul were the operator of a film editing table, advancing and rewinding footage on a film strip that is one’s own life, both inchoate and yet with potentialities already charted. In this scenario, the mind’s eye effectively becomes a camera, one that records an image from either lived experience in a previous



Rising in the East, Sett(l)ing in the West

361

incarnation or experiences yet to come on the human timeline, and rebroadcasts that visual memory forward or backward in order to intervene in the dreamer’s emplotment in the contemporary world. Accordingly, the filmstrip that is the soul’s incarnate journey may be variously cut and reassembled according to the choices of the present moment, always maintaining the free will to choose anew and thereby neutralize old karma or trigger new consequences. When the human psyche is thus posited as functioning cinematically, employing the scrambled temporalities we associate with film narrative, it becomes increasingly ambiguous whether it is the dream world or the lived world that bears the status of “reality,” and which causally operates upon the other. Throughout this paper, I have leaned heavily on the notion of indexicality, which has traditionally played such a central role in documentary’s aspiration towards empirical certainty. Yet even unadulterated film footage raises practical questions of interpretability, such that indexicality is easily overwhelmed by secondary iconic or symbolic signs. Thus, we may choose to believe Yeshi’s claim to have had visions, but we cannot personally verify that those indexically correlate with the sites we see unfolding before the camera; only Yeshi can do so, and we can choose to accept or refute his interpretation. The tulku effectively functions like a camera that gathers and stores potent film footage accumulated across lifetimes, to be projected in the present, as circumstances and the needs of the greater population, whom any given tulku is tasked to guide and assist, may dictate. As such, the reiterability of that footage is akin to Roman Jakobsen’s (1990) so-called “shifters.” The terms “here” and “now,” for example, can refer only to the moment or place in which they are spoken, and thus bear affinities with the indexical sign’s embedding in a specific time and place (through the snapshot, for example). But such words are also part of a larger symbolic system, flexible in its application such that one person’s “here” or “now” become another person’s “there” or “then.” In their ability to negotiate between distinct temporal and spatial dimensions, tulkus evoke the uncanny, a concept Freud (1959b) developed to refer to that which is simultaneously familiar and strange. Its relevance pertains to the manner in which the tulku impossibly traverses that final boundary between life and death otherwise upheld by Western science and philosophy. The tulku represents the living indexical trace of one who previously died, even as that indexicality cannot be verified through the modern science of genetics, or for that matter, through photography. In one scene from Fox’s film, Yeshi wanders over to a photograph in the family living room and holds it up (Figure 16.9), explaining that it is his uncle Khyentse (i.e., his avatar). In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes has remarked of family resemblances, “The photograph is like old age: even in its splendor, it disincarnates the face, manifests its genetic essence” (2010: 105). Yet family resemblances are not what haunt this mis-en-abyme created by Yeshi’s gaze upon his atavistic self. Rather it confirms something else Barthes also observed while exhuming the memories of his deceased mother:

362

Angelica Fenner

Figure 16.9  Khyentse Yeshe Namkhai regards a photo of his earlier incarnation, his uncle Khyentse Rinpoche Choekyi Wangchug. My Reincarnation (Jennifer Fox, 2011). Courtesy of Jennifer Fox. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I  shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. (2010: 96)

Barthes’s ensuing remark, “each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death,” assumes an uncanny significance in this scene from Fox’s film, when one considers that Yeshi is, in a sense, actually gazing upon a snapshot of his former self across the passage of time and historical events, and effectively, the threshold of death previously traversed and thereupon overcome through rebirth. It is the photographic image that facilitates this mirroring between past and present, hereby signaling another correspondence between the tulku and photography (and, by extension, the cinema). For the institutions of lamaistic reincarnation and of cinema, alike, reanimate that which was once immobilized through respectively death or mummification in the photographic image, and they do so most particularly with the human figure. With the passage of decades, even a century, fragile footage captured on silver nitrate still bears the capacity to veritably resurrect the dead and restore their mobility. Scholars of visual media seeking pre-technological avatars to the cinema have traditionally referenced an array of international models, from Plato’s allegory of the cave to tenth-century Persian scientist Alhazen’s pinhole camera and camera obscura; it may be useful to also take into account diverse Buddhist frameworks of reincarnation, which may someday prove not merely precursors to, but in fact, anticipatory of cinema’s supersession. Western science is only beginning to concede the existence of a human spirit, barely scraping the surface of



Rising in the East, Sett(l)ing in the West

363

the Buddhist understanding of consciousness and the mind consolidated more than a millennium ago and today globally disseminated through disparate media. Whether or not one subscribes to the belief in willed reincarnation, its exploration within documentary practice can function as a technology of the spirit, one that will continue to expand our understanding of distinct cultural permutations of what Benjamin presciently recognized as the “optical unconscious” (1999: 512).

Notes 1 See for example Malcolm David Eckel’s Buddhism (US, 2001), Robert Thurman’s Robert Thurman on Tibet (US, 2002) and Robert Thurman on Buddhism: The Buddha/The Dharma/ The Sangha (US, 1999), Yukari Hayashi and Barrie Angus Maclean’s The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Canada/Japan/France, 1994), and Dharma Vision’s 14-part series ­Discovering Buddhism (US, 2003). 2 A handful include: Compassion in Exile: The Story of the 14th Dalai Lama (US, Mickey Lemle, 1993), Heart of Tibet: An Intimate Portrait of the 14th Dalai Lama (US, David Cherniak, 1991), Dalai Lama: The Soul of Tibet (US, 1994), 10 Questions for the Dalai Lama (US, Rick Ray, 2006), The Unwinking Gaze: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Tibet (UK, Joshua Dugdale, 2008). 3 See http://www.savetibet.org/resource-center/maps-data-fact-sheets/self-immolation-factsheet, accessed July 31, 2014. 4 See the official website for the Dalai Lama, www.dalailama.com, and specifically the archived message dated December 13, 2007 under News. 5 For her first film, the two-hour Beirut: The Last Home Movie (1988), which was shot on 16 mm across a span of six years, she dropped out of NYU film school to follow good friend Gabby Bustros back to her native Beirut. There she documented daily life in ­Gabby’s aristocratic family, stolidly ensconced in their nineteenth-century mansion amidst a largely abandoned downtown while the Lebanese Civil War waged around them. In the 10-hour reality series, An American Love Story (1999), made for PBS and shot over one-and-a-half years on analog video, Fox became an ethnographic participant-observer regularly crashing on the living room couch of the biracial Wilson-Sims family in Queens, NY to document multicultural America at close quarters. In turn, the six-hour autobiographical documentary, Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman (2007), was produced for Danish television and loosely modeled on the Dogme style, placing constructive restrictions on the way a film is made in order to facilitate creative and often unanticipated innovations. Fox lived with a Sony PDX digital handheld camera for five years while traveling to 17 different countries, using the camera as a Rouchian “psychoanalytic stimulant” to be passed between herself and other women, as she searched for the so-called “red thread” that might link her own socio-specific experiences of gendered identity with that of other women (Fenner, 2009a; 2009b). 6 An historical cross-section includes: The Lion’s Roar (US, Mark Elliot, 1985), a portrait of the late Tibetan master, Gyalwa Karmapa, also known as the Black Hat Lama, whose reincarnations are said to trace back to the Shakyamuni Buddha himself; Lord of the Dance/ Destroyer of Illusion: The Secret World of a Tibetan Lama (Germany, Richard Kohn, 1986) about Trulshik Rinpoche living in exile in Nepal; Peace Is Every Step: The Life and Work of Thich Nhat Hanh (US, Gaetano Kazuo Maida, 1998); Words of My Perfect Teacher

364

Angelica Fenner

(US,  Lesley Ann Patten, 2003) about Dzongsar Khyentse Norbu, himself an award-­ winning filmmaker; and more recently, Neten Chokling Rinpoche’s Brilliant Moon (­Tibet/ India/Bhutan/Nepal, 2010), chronicling the birth, death, and rebirth of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, with narration by Richard Gere and Lou Reed.

References Barthes, Roland (2010) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard [1980]. New York: Hill & Wang. Benjamin, Walter (1988) The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction [1936]. In Arendt, Hannah (ed.) Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. Benjamin, Walter (1999) A Little History of Photography [1931]. In Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, Part 2: 1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, pp. 517–530. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Craig, Mary (1992) Tears of Blood: A Cry for Tibet. New Delhi: Harper Collins. Dalai Lama, H.H. (1991) Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama. New York: Harper. Dalai Lama, H.H. (2005) The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality. New York: Morgan Road Books. Ehrenburg, Ilya (1931) Die Traumfabrik: Chronik des Filmes. Berlin: Malik Verlag. Fenner, Angelica (2009a) The Dialogical Documentary: Jennifer Fox on Finding a New Film Language in Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman (2007). CineAction, 77, 25–33. Fenner, Angelica (2009b) Jennifer Fox’s Transcultural Talking Cure: Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman. Journal of Feminist Media Studies, 9(4), 427–445. Fielding, Julien (2008) Discovering World Religions at 24 Frames Per Second. Plymouth: Scarecrow Press. Freud, Sigmund (1959a) Family Romances [1909]. In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 9, pp. 238–239. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, Sigmund (1959b) The Uncanny [1919]. In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 17, pp. 217–256. London: Hogarth Press. Grierson, John (1976) First Principles of Documentary [1932–1934]. In Barsam, Richard Meran (ed.) Non-Fiction Film Theory and Criticism, pp. 19–30. New York: Dutton. Herzog, Werner (2010) On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth, trans. Moira Weigel. Arion, 17(3), 1–12. Jakobson, Roman (1990) Shifters and Verbal Categories [1957]. In Jakobson, On Language and Verbal Categories, ed. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston, pp. 386–392. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laird, Thomas (2006) The Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama. New York: Grove Press. McMahon, David L. (2008) The Making of Buddhist Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meunier, Jean-Pierre (1969) Les Structures de l’expérience filmique: l’identification filmique. Louvain: Librairie Universitaire. Mulvey, Laura (2006) Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion.



Rising in the East, Sett(l)ing in the West

365

Nichols, Bill (1991) Representing Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Peirce, Charles S. (1878) How To Make Our Ideas Clear. Popular Science Monthly, January, 286–302. Peirce, Charles S. (1940) The Philosophy of Science: Selected Writings, ed. Justus Buchler. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Shankman, Richard (2008) The Experience of Samadhi: An In-Depth Exploration of Buddhist Meditation. Boston, MA: Shambhala. Sobchak, Vivian (1999) Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience. In Gaines, Jane M. and Renov, Michael (eds.) Collecting Visible Evidence, pp. 241–254. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Suzuki, Shunryu (2010) Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, 40th anniversary edn. Boston, MA: Shambhala. Thondup, Tulku (2011) Incarnation: The History and Mysticism of the Tulku Tradition of Tibet. Boston, MA: Shambhala. Tsering, Geshe Tashi (2005) The Four Noble Truths: The Foundation of Buddhist Thought, vol. 1. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications. Winston, Brian (2005) Ethics [1988]. In Rosenthal, Alan and Corner, John (eds.) New Challenges for Documentary, pp. 181–193. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Žižek, Slavoj (2001) On Belief. London: Routledge.

17

The New Religious Wave in Israeli Documentary Cinema Negotiating Jewish Fundamentalism During the Second Intifada Raya Morag

Introduction1 In recent years, Israeli cinema has witnessed the emergence of a religious wave. The new visibility given to religiousness in narrative films is striking given the fact that issues of Jewish religiosity had been largely absent from Israeli film (and television) production; in fact, only 20 out of over 420 Israeli films produced between 1960 and 1995 dealt with religious themes (Parciack, 1998: 328). I suggest that only after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 did Israeli cinema begin to represent the religious other, largely in response to a drastic turn to the political right among the population. Rabin’s assassination was a traumatic turning point in the heated divide between religious belief and secular worldview in a country haunted by religious extremism since 1948, when David Ben-Gurion made the conscious decision not to separate governance from religion and established the State of Israel as a “Jewish democracy.” Since then, and increasingly apparent recently, it has transformed into a “theocratic democracy” (Ben-Yehuda, 2011). Israel’s slide to the right was exacerbated by the unlikely partnership between two fundamentalist movements: Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), which is Orthodox and ultra-Zionist and devoted to expanding settlement of the Occupied Territories; and Haredim (“those who fear and obey God”), who are ultra-Orthodox and anti- or a-Zionist and reject the State of Israel.2 Right-wing influence became even more apparent to the secular Left when massive support from the ultra-Orthodox helped right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu win the 1996 election for prime minister after the assassination. It should be noted that while formally the ultra-Orthodox, which in 2000 made up 8–12 percent of the Jewish population (Ben-Yehuda, 2011: 13), are A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



The New Religious Wave in Israeli Documentary Cinema

367

ostensibly equal Israeli citizens, in reality they enjoy certain special privileges, including an autonomous educational system, exemption from compulsory military service, and ever-growing state subsidies to great numbers of adult men with extremely large families who study religion in lieu of taking part in the work force. This is often resentfully perceived as exploitation and lack of reciprocity, evoking harsh criticism from the general public. The intensification that has emerged in Israel of what was once considered globally “a latent schism between religious and secular world views” (Mahmood, 2008: 448), is due in some part to the global rise of religious politics in the post-9/11 era and the subsequent war on terror, though it precedes these events by some years. In Israel, this schism expanded tremendously. Its protracted “overt latency” exploded traumatically after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995 when the second Intifada broke out, making Israel a terror-ridden society radically divided in terms of Right-Left politics. It was especially felt in the escalation of the settlement movement’s power over political, social, and cultural life; in the increasing power of feminist religious organizations; in the entry of soldiers from the national-religious bloc to areas previously closed to them, such as the highest military ranks; in the rise of the relatively new and ever growing Hardali (ultra-Orthodox Zionist-nationalistic) movement that follows an extremist religious lifestyle while embodying what it defines as the “new Zionism”;3 and in the so-called modesty revolution, imposed by the Haredim on the public sphere through gender-segregated buses and streets, prohibition of advertising showing women, opposition to women singing at public ceremonies, and a series of other extreme, mostly gendered, sanctions. The growing influence of religious extremists in every sector of Israeli post-second Intifada life generates ongoing action and debate in regard to Israel’s fragile status as a theocratic democracy.4 The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was fueled for years by Israel’s inability to effectively address the: recognition of the ways in which Zionism, though understanding itself as an emancipatory movement for Jews, instituted a colonial project and the colonial subjugation of the Palestinian people … to tell two histories at once, and to show how they converge, and how the claim of freedom for one became the claim of dispossession for another. (Judith Butler interviewed in Schneider, 2011)

It has reached a stage in which Haredi violence towards the inner other (be it women or Israeli-Arabs) and Hardali and settler violence towards the ethnic other (be it the Palestinian or the secular Jew, including non-religious IDF soldiers) have become an acute threat to democracy. The question of how the history of the oppressed might erupt within the continuous history of the oppressor, has, therefore, at least two implications – towards both inner and outer others. As Ben-Yehuda (2011: 9–10) suggests: The Israeli state–religion conflict has far-reaching consequences for finding a solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. … On the one hand, we have a symbolic–moral

368

Raya Morag

­ niverse that emphasizes a nation state based on democracy, human rights, freedom, u and a westernized liberal legal foundation – in short, a liberal democracy. On the other hand is a very different symbolic–moral universe with a foundation that is a religious belief, a Halakhic worldview, theologically fundamentalist, which feels threatened by modernity, wants to emphasize tradition, and is extremely conservative.

The rise of the new religious cinematic wave, causing inundation of religion in an industry for decades dominated by the secular left-wing, is related not only to historical, traumatic, and socio-political factors, as described above, but also to industrial ones. For example, a number of actors and directors became religious, or (more commonly) became secular; two funds for Israeli cinema supporting only multicultural and Jewish projects were expanded; and the religious Jewish-oriented Ma’aleh School of Television, Film and Arts was established in 1989. The latter two  especially attest to the dramatic change brought about by figures from the national-Zionist community joining the world of modern media production (see Jacobson, 2004). Religious themes, figures, practices, symbols, myths, and beliefs have, in many respects, flooded the screens. In addition, this is not limited to the cinema: In theatre, ultra-Orthodox life has flourished and stage productions have won several prizes. Television series, devoted to representing mainstream national-Zionist religiousness and the religious family (including those torn between religious and non-religious members) became very popular.5 Israel’s secular culture has become saturated with religious images. In this post-traumatic and rapidly changing secular culture, and amid chronic, polarized, and increasingly violent intra-Jewish struggles, it is my contention that Israeli documentary cinema plays a major social role. It offers Israeli audiences a worldview that stands in sharp contrast to those structures and codes of mainstream cinema that became complicit with Israel as a theocratic state, governed by the “rule of God.” The documentary new wave promotes Western liberal/democratic values as an alternative to fundamentalist representations that have captured the imagination of wide sectors of Israeli society. Creating an alternative to dominant politics and making “visible” of what is hidden provides secular spectators with a format for self-exploration through which they can reassess their identity. Insisting on a space for secular cinematic language, the second Intifada’s new systems of representation vis-à-vis religiosity are challenged. The question of what it means to be a documentarist in a society that is so harshly and dangerously involved in a cultural clash is answered by pointing to the complex role of mapping out experiences as well as practices and discourses that oppose rabbinic-patriarchal-nationalist dominance of the public sphere and the entertainment forms that legitimate it. Watching narrative films with religious themes made during the second Intifada, however, reveals that they are devoted exclusively to the representation of the minority figure of the ultra-Orthodox Jew.6 Only a few years after the heated debate between the Left and the national-Zionists, who encouraged the violent messianic worldview that led to Rabin’s assassination,7 narrative cinema counter-intuitively



The New Religious Wave in Israeli Documentary Cinema

369

regards the ultra-Orthodox as its ultimate other and celebrates this otherness as harmless entertainment. It neither deals with the extreme and highly influential figure of the religious national-Zionist settler nor with the Hardali settler. Although the anti- or a-Zionist ultra-Orthodox minority certainly gained political power with Benjamin Netanyahu’s election, the far more pressing and troubling influence is that of the ultra-nationalist Zionist factions, who have been the main force behind the expanded settlements in the Occupied Territories. Displacement from the settler to the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox figure sets the latter as a benign substitute through which multiculturalist and multi-religious denominational conflicts and Left-Right clashes are negotiated. Moreover, the settlements and the Palestinian space they have so effectively and ruthlessly torn apart are almost never represented on the new wave’s cinematic screen. Instead, narrative cinema turns to the ultra-Orthodox family as its preferred site of conflicts, though without encouraging an allegorical reading of the films.8 The fundamentalist figures are given a central space through processes of exoticization, mainstreaming, and recuperation. Being forbidden, of course, to the separatist ultra-Orthodox population, these films (and their counterparts on television and the stage) serve both Israeli secular and national-religious Zionist audiences, who consume the internal other as yet an other-turned-I. This process of ingestion of the other is evident in the recent huge commercial success of Rama Burshtein’s film Fill the Void (2012), which encourages identification by portraying an upper-middle-class Haredi family living in the secular center of Tel-Aviv rather than in an ultra-Orthodox enclave, and through a “romanticization” of oppressive religious practices regarding arranged marriages.9 In order to deal with the various routes taken by the new religious wave, which propose alternatives to this major trend in narrative cinema, I will first briefly analyze Netalie Braun’s Gevald (2008) as an example of a film that blurs the boundaries between narrative and documentary filmmaking; it was shot at the location where some of the events portrayed actually took place, using an abundance of archival footage of the event and members of the local gay community rather than actors and actresses. Though this acclaimed short drama,10 written, directed, and produced by Braun, does not deal with the figure of the settler, it is unique in narrative cinema’s self-delusional strategy in that it subversively captures the clashes between the Jewish-Israeli Right and Left and both Jewish and Moslem fundamentalism. In its open refusal to rehabilitate the ultra-Orthodox other through re-imagery, Gevald also sheds light on the complex role the left-wing wave of documentary cinema, discussed below, takes upon itself in the current heated Israeli social climate of the Intifada age. Undoubtedly, and somehow paradoxically, it is the age in which current Israeli narrative cinema has been received extremely positively both inside and outside Israel.11 This has contributed to a contemporary revival of Israeli left-wing documentary cinema’s investigative realism and the establishment of polemical, adversarial documentary as a genre increasing in importance during times of crises. Taking Gevald as a cinematic and ideological background for appraisal of the new left-wing documentary wave, I will then compare two documentaries – a left-wing secular one that attacks the so-called modesty revolution, and a right-wing religious

370

Raya Morag

one that praises the settlement movement. Finally, I propose a reflection on the ways both right- and left-wing documentaries challenge the multiculturalist/multidenominational (secular vs. religious, Jewish vs. Arab) conception as one that promotes democracy and tolerance and undermines othering.

Gevald Made to be screened at the festival that usually ends the annual Jerusalem gay pride parade, Gevald, a nominally fictional film with an historically accurate premise and certain “documentary” elements, is set in a gay bar on the eve of the controversial 2006 parade. As the film’s opening titles indicate, the previous year three participants had been stabbed by an ultra-Orthodox Jew and in 2006 the ultra-Orthodox community fought to cancel the parade. After being postponed, the event took place in a closed stadium. The first scene of the film takes place in the gay bar with the drag-queen host addressing the immediate audience (and offscreen secular spectators), and apparently the ultra-Orthodox community as well. Mocking the cancellation of the parade, the host encourages the bar’s audience to loudly protest by crying “Gevald,” the same word used by the ultra-Orthodox in their protests. The parodic cry has various effects. First, it imaginarily counteracts the collective violence of the Haredi call by virtue of performative appropriation. Braun cuts from the Israeli and Palestinian gay bar guests gleefully shouting “Gevald!” (meaning “disaster” here, referring to the parade’s cancellation and hateful Haredi oppression) to archival footage of thousands of ultra-Orthodox men demonstrating against the gay community by furiously shouting the same word (but, in this iteration, meaning “danger”).12 Second, through editing, the response to the host’s demand to shout even louder replaces the ultra-Orthodox cry with the queer voice. Thus, this imaginary performance, which stands in for the unperformed gay parade, takes over the Haredi demonstration. By using the same Yiddish word, the cross-cutting points to a shared Jewish background that the Haredim would want to deny, claiming as they do the unique role of embodying “true” Jewishness. It expropriates Jewishness out of their hands. This move seems to upend the parodic relation as delineated by Linda Hutcheon whereby the present (in this case Israeli “New Jew”-ish secular and queer life) suffers “ironic contamination” (Hutcheon, 1986–1987: 189) from the past (“Old Jew”-ish life as interpreted by the Haredim). Here, the exact structural echoing of the cry is made parodic through repetition at an ironic distance, projecting the secular queerness of the present over the archaic rules of ultra-Orthodoxy. This is evidenced again as the show continues and Braun cuts from footage of Haredim defining homosexuality as bestiality by holding sheep and imitating their cry to a performance in the bar of the Hebrew version of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” making the demonstration and the bar counter-reflections of each other. Dressed as a cow, the performer imitates the cows’ voices (“everywhere a moo moo”), mimicking those of the Haredim, thus subverting their possession of the public space.



The New Religious Wave in Israeli Documentary Cinema

371

In light of Butler’s (1990a: 122) claim that parodic practices destabilize substantive identity and expose the illusion of gender identity as an intractable depth and inner substance, the readability of the ultra-Orthodox performance as queer is part of an imaginary “colonizing” appropriation of ultra-Orthodoxy. The third function of the parody points to the most subversive part of Gevald’s queering act: through the sound bridge, the LGBT’s repeated shouting coopts the Haredi demonstration as an imaginary part of the drag show viewed by the offscreen spectator. The cry gevald projects a drag-like quality onto the footage of the mass of black attired ultra-Orthodox men, a latent quality, apparently yet to be revealed. The Greek prefix para, as Hutcheon (1986–1987) and, to a lesser degree, Seymour Chatman (2001) emphasizes, can mean counter as well as near. In Gevald, through both voice/image split and audial mimicry the parody raises possible contradictions, both “counter” and “near,” which are apparently hiding inside this closed community: visibility/invisibility and difference/sameness. In other words, the mimicry turns the collective ritual of the Haredim upside down, and (queering the difference) points to coming out – either in terms of religious and/or sexual orientation. In this, the mimicry broadens the notion of parody by foregrounding it as an act of interpellation. As Hutcheon contends: Parody has perhaps come to be a privileged mode of formal self-reflexivity because its paradoxical incorporation of the past into its very structures often points to these ideological contexts somewhat more obviously, more didactically, than other forms. Parody seems to offer a perspective on the present and the past which allows an artist to speak TO a discourse from WITHIN it, but without being totally recuperated by it. Parody appears to have become, for this reason, the mode of the marginalized, or of those who are fighting marginalization by a dominant ideology. (1986–1987: 206, emphases in the original)

Gevald’s narrative is centered on a love story between an unnamed secular Jewish lesbian and her religious ex-lover, Na’ama, who comes to the club on the eve of the parade to warn her about dangerous violence planned by the Haredim. They watch a drag-king show performed by lesbian Palestinians. The show begins with a semistriptease that exposes what looks like an explosives belt tied to the naked back of the performer playing a suicidal bomber preparing for his mission. While his young lover sings a farewell love song in Arabic, the secular Israeli lesbian translates the words into Hebrew for Na’ama: “I swear my life is worthless without you … You promised to share your love with me … Go, I will accept your absence.” In the queer space of the bar, the heterosexual Saudi love song by Hussein Al Jasmi portends the multi-layering of the drag. Cross-cutting between the onstage Palestinian performance and the offstage translation of the song makes the latter, with its hidden overtones, a kind of performance as well – an interpretation of the Israeli couple’s own doomed love (and a reflection on Na’ama’s forthcoming heterosexual arranged marriage). Moreover, the names Youssuf and Jabbar taken by the performers parodies the popular Israeli gay film Yossi and Jagger (Eytan Fox, 2002) that tells the love story

372

Raya Morag

Figure 17.1  A Saudi love song in Gevald (Netalie Braun, 2008, produced by Netalie Braun). Courtesy of Netalie Braun.

between two male soldiers, Yossi (Ohad Knoller) and Lior (Yehuda Levi), nicknamed Jagger, who dies in battle during the first Lebanon War. The drag act recasts Yossi and Jagger’s well-known hetero-normative (and implicitly patriotic and Zionist) gay love story into a queer Palestinian narrative of fundamentalism and resistance, embodied by the suicide bomber. Fully available for repetition, impersonation, and appropriation, Israeli masculinity is represented as unstable and fraudulent by Palestinian “kinging,” as Judith Halberstam (1998) calls this sensibility. However, the parody refers to the concealed cinematic secret of Yossi and Jagger’s gay love, to the presumably hidden secret of the Palestinian couple, and that of Na’ama, the Orthodox-Jewish woman. Challenging the primacy, authenticity, and originality of dominant masculinities, staged and costumed masculinity channels ethnic and gendered secrets through the drag act. Throughout the king show, Jewish and Moslem fundamentalisms are named as the cause of the real and imagined romantic separations on and off the stage. These interconnections (the intertextuality and the equation between the gay and lesbian closet and ultra-Orthodoxy as a kind of closet) make Gevald’s postmodern queering of the Haredi community even more powerful. With its triple secrets, the drag show emphasizes not only that there are tensions of visibility vs. invisibility and difference vs. sameness shared by these opposing groups, but also the tension of being/passing. The film leaves the source of the explosion heard at its end unknown, though it tacitly suggests that in this climate of intensified repression it was a Haredi hate crime. But, blurring the boundaries between fiction and documentary, this explosion eerily recalls the suicide bomber in the show. Though the drag king show subverts



The New Religious Wave in Israeli Documentary Cinema

373

Figure 17.2  Youssuf and Jabbar kinging in Gevald (Netalie Braun, 2008, produced by Netalie Braun). Courtesy of Netalie Braun.

the different conceptions of Israeli and Palestinian societies in regard to the suicide bomber’s act, and simultaneously highlights the tension between a gay lifestyle and Israel’s homophobic militaristic masculinity, the explosion questions the different concepts of masculinity it entails. The tragic end does not accept the Haredi hate crime, but does it accept the suicide bomber’s? Does Gevald venture to suggest, during the aftermath of the second Intifada, a Jewish-gay fantasy of multi-ethnic self-annihiliation? When Judith Halberstam asks “What is the exact location of ‘a place of rage,’” her answer is: “The relationship between imagined violence and ‘real’ violence is unclear, contested, negotiable, unstable, and radically unpredictable; and yet, imagined and real violence is not simply a binary formulation” (1993: 187–188). The gay bar, however, becomes a fantasmatic site in which both real and imagined fundamentalist violence is negotiated, tested through their theatricality, and comprehended as radically unpredictable. In this negotiation of imagined violence, as Judith Butler (1990b: 106) contends, the power of fantasy is not to represent, but to destabilize the real.

Black Bus Israeli left-wing documentary cinema offers a different route from the one taken by the narrative new religious wave. It is no wonder, perhaps, that most of the documentaries on Jewish religious fundamentalism were made by women directors.13

374

Raya Morag

Anat Zuria’s three documentary films, Purity (2002), Sentenced to Marriage (2004), and Black Bus (2009), are exceptional in breaking almost two decades of benign and  recuperated representations of ultra-Orthodox couplehood and community. Although none of these acclaimed films deal with the figure of the settler, their vision, commitment, and rhetoric pave the way for an unconventional cry for spectators’ engagement, shaping negotiations of contradictory representations of sen­ suality vs. spirituality, holiness vs. sexuality, voyeurism vs. multiple looks, and the female voice vs. the patriarchal-halachik (religious)-male voice. Zuria’s Black Bus (the Hebrew title, Soreret, means rebellious woman), is unique in Israeli documentary cinema. Because of total lack of access to the ultra-Orthodox community, the film portrays two women, Shulamit and Sarah, who left the community, and traces their struggle during transition to secular society: from a life of violence and subservience to one of freedom; from an identity in which every detail is dictated in advance to a dynamic one that is re-formed every day anew; from life within a community and family to one that sentenced them to loneliness. In contrast to exiles or immigrants, who maintain an ongoing connection with their distant families, for example, the severance is total. As evidenced by scathing reactions to the film and its protagonists on ultraOrthodox websites, the label “rebellious woman” does not specifically refer to leaving a life of faith, but to the autonomous activism of these women. Their voices are heard because Sarah writes a subversive blog and Shulamit takes still photos on the ultra-Orthodox street. In this sense, Zuria’s film relates to another rebellious woman  – the director herself, who left the Haredi world and whose cinematic voice is heard indirectly through the story of the two artists and mediates Sarah’s words and Shulamit’s visuals. Can these three women’s creative and autonomous

Figure 17.3  Shulamit near a pashkevil that reads: “A wanton woman proves she’s not satisfied with herself.” Black Bus (Anat Zuria, 2009, produced by Anat Zuria and Sigal Landesberg). Courtesy of Anat Zuria.



The New Religious Wave in Israeli Documentary Cinema

375

Figure 17.4  The segregated bus in Black Bus. The sign reads: “Travel with the Torah, Travel Segregated.” Black Bus (Anat Zuria, 2009, produced by Anat Zuria and Sigal Landesberg). Courtesy of Anat Zuria.

acts (writing a blog, still photography, filmmaking) stand up to the modesty revolution that has developed in the ultra-Orthodox community over the past decade, forcing women to board and sit only at the back of public buses, which have become segregated,14 and on certain streets to walk only on the side of the road designated for women? How should cinematic language describe the misogyny that rears its head, disguised as a mystical longing for repair of the world and norms of halakhic purity? I contend that the body, which poses a major problem for religious men and plays a key role in their typical behavior, particularly in their violence, becomes the major means for women directors to portray fundamentalism.15 Discussing fundamentalism in terms of the body allows negotiation between the different facets and body-liness of the ultra-Orthodox male and female (and by implication, of the most hidden figure in Israeli culture – the Hardalim). Zuria’s camera follows Shulamit during her endless wanderings through the streets of ultra-religious neighborhoods of Jerusalem and Bnei Brak. Day and night, obsessively, Shulamit’s camera is directed mainly at her alter ego, the ultra-Orthodox woman, creating self-reflexive photography based on attraction-repulsion to her object. In one scene, she captures an ultra-Orthodox woman who, seeing the camera, quickly bends and hides herself behind the stroller she is pushing. Shulamit’s photograph captures the decisive moment in which the woman’s body makes itself unseen. Embodying symbolic violence, the woman expresses through her contorted body, acceptance of the public space as exclusively male, patriarchal, and rabbinic. The segregation means she is not simply oppressed but produced as invisible again and again through the repressive mechanisms of the modesty revolution. The women’s compliance with bus and street segregation indicates, above all, the ways in which the ultra-Orthodox separatist movement has taken over the public

376

Raya Morag

space in Israel. As a number of incidents that almost ended in lynchings have demonstrated, even secular women getting on one of these public bus lines are required to submit to the Orthodox rule. As Sarah and Shulamit painfully describe, the modesty revolution has forced a complete separation between the genders, dominating every phase of life: home, family, street, bus. In cutting moments of time and collecting pictures that document the frozen moment, Shulamit returns again and again to still photography’s ability to stand in symbolically for death, in this case, of the ultra-Orthodox world. In his classic book, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes bears witness to the relationship of photography to death most poignantly: “[T]he Photograph … represents that very subtle moment … a micro-version of death … I am truly becoming a specter. The photographer[‘s] gesture will embalm me … I have become Total Image … Death in person” (1980: 14, capitals in the original). Moreover, Zuria juxtaposes the frozen time of still photography and the rapid dissemination of Shulamit’s blog against the movement of segregated buses. In a displaced historical repetition – in this case, of racial discrimination in pre-Rosa Parks United States – Zuria incessantly shoots women boarding the buses from the rear and men boarding from the front. Exposing the repressive, usually invisible, rules of the modesty revolution, the segregated bus becomes a metaphor for the world through which it travels. Black Bus juxtaposes the difference and sameness between the ultra-Orthodox and the un-Orthodox bodies. When Sarah, the second rebellious woman of the film, meets with a Hasidic man, the looks of both the camera and the Hasid focus on her self-mutilated arm. For the first time we see the deep cuts she has made, some still swollen. I contend that the skin, no less than the computer screen on which she writes her blog, becomes for her an “expressive space,” as Merleau-Ponty (1962: 146–147) calls it, of the contradictions of past abuse still felt in the body. Paradoxically, like Shulamit’s symbolic Barthesian act of killing the Haredi community through shooting stills, Sarah’s self-mutilation connects her repeatedly to her violent past. Psychiatric and psychological critics (McLane, 1996; Riley, 2002) purport that the self-mutilator stabilizes a chaotic existence by establishing the difference between pain and painfree (injury exists here and now, not everywhere and always), between existence and non-existence of the self (she feels, therefore she is), and between self and others (the harm is not caused by others). To conform to the demands of “normality” in the ultra-Orthodox community, Sarah was forced to present herself as unwounded. In the present, providing a voice on the skin after her actual voice had been forbidden for years, this self-inflicted violence becomes a post-traumatic gestural communication. If all humans, as Merleau-Ponty (1962: 198) claims, create unifying gestures through which to live, then Sarah can be said to be paradoxically finding and creating such unity in her lived body, and therefore in her self. Sarah’s possession of the body is literally carved into her skin. This bodily voice is not language in itself, but a possible precondition for future language where violently enforced silence is the rule. The computer screen and the skin as expressions of emotional wounding become, as Elaine Scarry (1985) asserts in the subtitle of her book, “the unmaking of the world.”



The New Religious Wave in Israeli Documentary Cinema

377

Black Bus exposes only a tiny thread of a dark story. Given the radical policing of body and space in the ultra-Orthodox community, Zuria’s casting of Sarah and Shulamit as the protagonists (chosen out of 100 young women Zuria interviewed during the first stages of production) makes their radiant physical presence more than a mere symbol of subversion. Both Shulamit and Sarah are young beauties. The camera’s gaze on their female bodies could be considered voyeuristic and objectifying, but it above all serves as a means to expose the tension between religious ­fundamentalism and secularism, submission and opposition, fantasmatic messianism and reality, and invisibility and spectacle. Beyond that, however, as part and parcel of opposing the modesty revolution that de-feminizes women’s appearances, Sarah and Shulamit’s presence on the cinematic screen at the height of their beauty means a process of contestation. Black Bus offers them, and us, the option of a ­different look. In both Gevald and Black Bus women fight against halachik rule to speak about their experiences to the degree that past abuse and repression are communicated in their physical style, gestures, and performances. In both, revisualizing the women’s body-liness becomes the major tool against past abuse and repression. Still, though the new left-wing documentaries represented here by Black Bus are critical of Jewish ultra-Orthodox fundamentalism, they do not relate to the more acute problem of the dominance of the settler in Israeli secular life. In this regard, the representations of the ultra-Orthodox body and its symbolic spatial extensions (the bar, the bus) displace the settlements’ space, making the latter even more unseeable, and thus, non-negotiable. Narrative cinema, stage, and television productions, as hinted at above, exacerbate this displaced invisibility by foregrounding the Haredi community and national-Zionism as sources for ongoing highly popular entertainment at the expense of any representation of the even more perturbing extremists. Paradoxically, it is the right-wing new wave film that depicts the settler and the settlement on screen, totally erasing any hint of acknowledgment of the settlements’ space as Palestinian, the settler as an embodiment of the occupation, and the indisputable fact of this wave’s zealotry.

The Rebellious Son As a new right-wing religious documentary, The Rebellious Son (Shoshi Greenfield, 2009) stands in sharp contrast to Braun’s Gevald, Zuria’s Black Bus, and indeed, all new left-wing religious documentaries in that it endorses and praises the fundamentalism depicted rather than being critical of it. The film follows the journey of the director’s cousin, Yaacov, who quits school to join an illegal settlement in the Occupied Territories and become a shepherd in the Hebron Mountains, and – ­frustrated over a failed romance – supports the Gaza settlers against the 2009 disengagement. In contrast to his previous attitude, though he could claim he is Haredi and be exempted from service, Yaacov decides to be drafted into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for his own reasons (as he states: in order to “learn … how to fight”).16

378

Raya Morag

Michael Renov’s (1993) formulation of four possible modes of the documentary (record, persuade, analyze, and express) emphasizes documentaries as products of historical, cultural, and technological contexts. I suggest that as a right-wing nationalZionist film The Rebellious Son uses various cinematic strategies to highlight persuasion at the expense of recording and analyzing. First, it blurs the boundaries between the voice-over of the director, who emphatically and humorously presents Yaacov’s journey as what she terms “a docu-comedy with a hint of tragedy,” and the blatant right-wing rhetoric that stands at the core of the film. Blurring humoristic commentary with harsh rhetoric means offering ideology disguised as entertainment. Moreover, though Yaacov is the film’s main figure and apparently its central voice, it is the director’s commentary, voice, and activism that, in fact, take over. Unlike Zuria, Greenfield hardly lets her hero speak, but rather speaks for him, her voice producing the voice-ofGod subject position without ever problematizing the authority it arrogates. On the one hand, her ongoing commentary opens an interval between the image and the spoken, which might be used by the viewer to reflect on her intervention, but as the journey proceeds the viewer becoming better acquainted with the protagonist, the spoken finally becomes an interpellation. Greenfield claims her right through family ties and her mode of production (she is credited as writer, cinematographer, and editor); on the other hand, the gap between Yaacov’s silence and Greenfield’s ongoing interpretation of his actions, motives, and moods creates a “we” that transcends family ties. While the voice-over technique implies that the film endorses Yaacov’s point of view, lack of clarity in regard to the ability of the omniscient authorial voice to accurately present what only appears to be another subject position busies the viewer with hermeneutics more than with epistemology. Thus the viewer is more inclined to be affected by ideology. To put it simply, the narration effectively dominates the visuals. “The socially oriented filmmaker is thus the almighty voice-giver … whose position of authority in the production of meaning continues to go unchallenged, skillfully masked as it is by its righteous mission” (Trinh, 1990: 83–84). The voice emerging from the narrative, far from being the expression of an autonomous individual, is a complex discursive phenomenon designed to make a very specific point. In this fashion the closing assertion about “just wars” completes a broader ideological shift toward the mobilization of national-religious new-Zionist sentiments. The other sleight of hand this film performs is in the displacement of the political-spatial violence towards Palestinians onto family “feuds” (the film’s ­ secondary title is “A story of family feuds”). Thus, the universal themes of coming-of-age and the generation gap serve to promote the film’s ideology, mostly hidden for the first part of the film. The voice-over denies the settlers’ involvement in the violent occupation of Palestinian land in the southern Hebron Mountains. Moreover, the film stages a return to the spot where a settler was killed by a Palestinian in order to emphasize that Yaacov is an “anarchist” who ignores potential Palestinian danger and, wishing for the peaceful life of a farmer, refuses – at this stage of his life, before his decision to join the IDF – to carry a gun. The camera and sound track are complicit with this one-sided depiction of the settlements’ reality. In one of the scenes, Greenfield depicts Yaacov and his friends driving to their farm



The New Religious Wave in Israeli Documentary Cinema

379

singing “The Zionist state is crumbling! It’s all over, folks! Judea is reawakening!” The singing magnifies the unrealistic openness of the road: there are no roadblocks or military forces, and no Palestinians on the landscape. The framing stages these “dreamers,” as the director calls them, as the sole occupants of the land. The film effectively gets away with such an elision by attempting to portray its protagonist’s pursuits as apolitical. It transfers the highly conflictual political discussion regarding the settlements, and especially the establishment by “hilltop youth” (noar hagva’ot) of illegal outposts in the occupied territories17 to the realm of spirituality and “back to nature” ideology.18 Phrasing political, social, and cultural issues in terms of a transcendence-driven “ecological” desire to “coexist with nature,” as Greenfield’s commentary interprets it, is a strategy that aims to mobilize this green, organic, down-to-earth worldview to argue, first, that the hilltop youth are peaceful persons, motivated by love of nature and spirituality; and, second, that Yaacov’s decision to be a soldier after his first refusal is an outcome of the impossible political circumstances imposed on him. The film nonetheless hitches itself to a foundational religious-Zionist ideology by using famous Zionist iconography from the beginning of Jewish settlement in Palestine during the 1880s (most notably the farmer with the wooden plough). Reproducing this iconography is part of establishing the hilltop youth as the New Zionists, repeating the original erasure of the presence of Palestinian farmers: the illegal outposts they build are engaged in organic farming and shun Palestinian labor in favor of Jewish, in line with the “old” Zionist principles. The production of meaning in this film is, in these and other ways, disavowed. As Trinh T. Minh-Ha contends: When, in a world of reification, truth is widely equated with fact, any explicit use of the magic, poetic, or irrational qualities specific to the film medium itself would have to be excluded a priori as nonfactual. … All, however, depend on their degree of invisibility in producing meaning. (1990: 85)

Greenfield does not disclose the particular ways in which the film produces and secures meaning. If, in Renov’s words, “the analytical documentary is likely to acknowledge that meditational structures are formative rather than mere embellishments” (1993: 29), the persuasive documentary is the most unlikely to acknowledge its meditational structures and poetics. The Rebellious Son refuses to be aware of its own artifice, let alone to remain sensitive to the flow between pre-existing ideological concepts and the real.

Conclusion: From Fundamentalism to Monoculturalism The films analyzed here negotiate the multicultural/multi-religious denominational perspective. The Israeli new wave of religious cinema that depicts fundamentalist minority groups proposes a certain clash with the current multiculturalist

380

Raya Morag

approach, especially in regard to its conception of multi-religious denomination societies and the current Israeli context. Derived from the political, social, and economic situation of the second Intifada, in which settler and Haredi minority groups gained enormous power over Israeli society at large, it offers a new look at current impasses of multiculturalism both inside and outside Israel.19 The questions that need to be asked revolve around whether the revival of (cinematic) Jewish fundamentalism can provide a key to mobilizing a change in an Israeli conception of the reality of the situation, and whether such a reality as revealed in these documentaries sheds light on the limits of the connection between fundamentalist groups and multicultural/multi-denominational concepts beyond the Israeli context. It is clear that new wave notions of purity and of engagement with transcendence that mask political aggression in the service of right-wing nationalistic colonialism (The Rebellious Son) and patriarchal fundamentalist conceptions (the world criticized in Black Bus and Gevald) use cinema neither as a site for ethical consideration of moral issues nor as “catalysts for ethical reflection” (Lyden, 2009: 9). The left-wing films, in their inability to deal directly with the fundamentalist settler, instead depicting the intolerance and oppressive violence prevalent in ultra-Orthodox culture, suggest questions about the contested ethics of religious violence. By calling attention to the political dimension of fundamentalism largely hidden in narrative films, these films grasp the distinctiveness of Jewish fundamentalism in the socio-political sphere rather than in the realm of ideas. As Gevald and Black Bus show, each in its distinctive poetics, under particular conditions multiculturalism/multi-denominational religiousness becomes a hegemonic doctrine. Both right- and left-wing films show that in Israeli culture, multiculturalism is no longer a multiple perspective, but has become a monoculturalist approach to imposing an apparent multiplicity. In Israel, the harsh left-right/secular-fundamentalist schism proves that “the concept of multiculturalism is polysemically open to various interpretations and subject to diverse political force fields; it has become a contested and in some ways empty signifier onto which diverse groups project their hopes and fears” (Shohat and Stam, 2003: 6). In the socio-politicalethnic-religious conditions of the second Intifada, crossing ethnic, religious, or gendered borders becomes a staged act, a fraud that leads to the next explosion.

Notes 1 My thanks to the Levi Eshkol Institute for Social, Economic and Political Research in Israel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for funding this research and to the editors of this book for their invaluable editorial advice. 2 Martin Marty and Scott Appleby emphasize that fundamentalists “arise in response to crises they perceive as threatening to the identity of the group.” See Silberstein (1993: 5), who discusses and characterizes fundamentalist movements, Goodman and Fischer (2004), and Ravitzky (1996).



The New Religious Wave in Israeli Documentary Cinema

381

3 “New Zionism” (known also as neo-Zionism) is a right-wing, nationalistic, and religious movement that appeared in Israel following the 1967 Six Day War and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It evolved parallel with, and in opposition to, post-­ Zionism. Neo-Zionists consider “secular Zionism,” particularly the version practiced by the Labor Party at that time, too weak on nationalism and naïve in its belief that Arabs and Jews could live together in peace. New Zionists view the Land of Israel (the state plus the West Bank and Gaza Strip) as the natural and biblically mandated home of the Jewish people and assert that the goal of Jewish statehood is not only to create a safe refuge for Jews but also to fulfill the national-historic destiny of the people of Israel. 4 Ben-Yehuda (2011: esp. 199–201, 209–211) contends that it is this imbalanced balance which keeps Israeli society from inner explosion. 5 See, e.g., in theatre, Micha Levinson’s Mikve (2003–2004) and Oded Kotler’s Apples from the Desert (2008); in television series, Roni Ninyo’s Merchak Negia (2007) and Laizy Shapira’s Srugim (2008–2011). During these years, Israeli documentary cinema also evinces the emergence of a new queer religious trend. 6 For example, Gidi Dar’s Ushpizin (2004) and Avi Nesher’s The Secrets (2007). 7 Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, was heavily influenced by a rabbinical trend that considered Rabin a rodef (pursuer) who endangered Jewish lives by signing the Oslo Accords. The concept of din rodef (punishment of the pursuer), Amir’s justification for his action, was heavily debated after the assassination. 8 See, e.g., Gidi Dar’s Ushpizin (2004), Avi Nesher’s The Secrets (2007), David Volach’s My Father My Lord (2007), and Avishai Sivan’s The Wanderer (2010). 9 This was the most watched film in Israel for the entire year despite the director’s decision not to screen it during the Sabbath, the most popular time for film attendance. 10 The film premiered at the 2009 Berlinale, took second place in the Goethe Institute’s International Short Film Competition on human rights, and won first prize at TLVFEST. 11 For example, Shmuel Maoz’s Lebanon (2009) and Yosef Cedar’s Footnote (2011). 12 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPQAOlG-Rk4, accessed August 1, 2014. 13 For example, Taliya Finkel’s Tikkun (2002) and Lina Chaplin’s Yoel Israel and the Pashkevils (2006). 14 Each day over 2,000 such bus trips take place in 28 cities. Ten years after the phenomena began, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled against segregated buses (see Wharton, 2011). Wharton, a Jerusalem city council member representing the leftist human rights political party Meretz, concluded that only 0.75 percent of the population favors such segregation. 15 See also Aran, Stadler, and Ben-Ari (2008). This paper, like mine, offers a post-Boyarin conceptualization of the Jewish male. Boyarin’s analysis of the socio-psychic processes involved with the male Jewish body and its symbolizations vis-à-vis the gentile/Christian body, paves the way for later interpretations of Jewish-Zionist maleness figured through the body. See Boyarin (1997). 16 The Rebellious Son begins with a decidedly unrebellious son – the director’s brother, Yehuda – and with the director’s call to save Nezarim (a Jewish settlement in Gaza that was part of the 2009 disengagement); it ends with Yehuda’s military funeral and the director’s call to distinguish between what she terms “lost wars” (in which her brother died) and “just wars” (in which “one should die”). 17 Many are satellites of existing settlements occupying an adjoining field or hilltop; others are designed to obstruct continuity between Palestinian population centers.

382

Raya Morag

18 In one scene, Yaacov takes his grandmother to see his flock in the meadow. The camera shows him drawing water for her from what seems to be an old Palestinian well, treating it as his own property. The grandmother says: “I find it funny that you are the much maligned and dangerous hilltop youth.” 19 Though the study of religion and film is still young, existing research has not yet delved into this issue. See, e.g., Mitchell and Plate (2009) and Lyden (2009).

References Aran, G., Stadler, N., and Ben-Ari, E. (2008) Fundamentalism and the Masculine Body: The Case of Jewish Ultra-Orthodox Men in Israel. Religion, 38, 25–53. Barthes, R. (1980) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard. New York: Hill & Wang. Ben-Yehuda, N. (2011) Theocratic Democracy: The Social Construction of Religious and Secular Extremism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boyarin, D. (1997) Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and The Invention of The Jewish Man. Berkeley: University of California Press. Butler, J. (1990a) Gender Trouble, Feminism, and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1990b) The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess. Differences, 2(2), 105–125. Chatman, S.B. (2001) Parody and Style. Poetics Today, 22(1), 25–39. Goodman, Y. and Fischer, S. (2004) Understanding Religion and Secularity in Israel: The Secularization Thesis and Its Conceptual Alternatives. In Yonah, Y. and Goodman, Y. (eds.) Maelstrom of Identities: A Critical Look at Religion and Secularity in Israel, pp. 346–390. Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hamuechad Publishing House. (In Hebrew.) Halberstam, J. (1993) Imagined Violence/Queer Violence: Representation, Rage, and Resistance. Social Text, 37, 187–201. Halberstam, J. (1998) Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hutcheon, L. (1986–1987) The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History. Cultural Critique, 5, 179–207. Jacobson, D.C. (2004) The Ma’ale School: Catalyst for the Entrance of Religious Zionists into the World of Media Production. Israel Studies, 9(1), 31–60. Lyden, J. (ed.) (2009) Introduction. In Lyden (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Religion and Film, pp. 1–10. London: Routledge. McLane, J. (1966) The Voice on the Skin: Self-Mutilation and Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Language. Hypatia, 11(4), 107–118. Mahmood, S. (2008) Is Critique Secular? A Symposium at UC Berkeley. Public Culture, 20(3), 447–452. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mitchell, J. and Plate, S.B. (eds.) (2007) The Religion and Film Reader. New York: Routledge. Parciack, R. (1998). Beyond the Wall: The Religious Emotion in Israeli Cinema. In Gertz, N., Lubin, O., and Ne’eman, J. (eds.) Fictive Looks – On Israeli Cinema, pp. 328–341. Tel-Aviv: The Open University of Israel. (In Hebrew.)



The New Religious Wave in Israeli Documentary Cinema

383

Ravitzky, A. (1996) Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism, trans. M. Swirsky and J. Chipman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Renov, M. (ed.) (1993) Theorizing Documentary. New York: Routledge. Riley, S. (2002) A Feminist Construction of Body Art as a Harmful Cultural Practice: A Response to Jeffreys. Feminism & Psychology, 12(4), 540–545. Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schneider, N. (2011) Implicated and Enraged: An Interview with Judith Butler. SSRC, The  Immanent Frame, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/04/01/implicated-and-enraged-an-­ interview-with-judith-butler/, accessed August 1, 2014. Shohat, E. and Stam, R. (2003) Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Silberstein, L.J. (ed.) (1993) Jewish Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective: Religion, Ideology, and the Crisis of Modernity. New York: New York University Press. Trinh, T.M. (1990) Documentary Is/not a Name. October, 52, 76–98. Wharton, L. (2011) Important Statistics on the Mehadrin (Separation) Buses. Ynet, http:// www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4010198,00.html, accessed August 1, 2014. (In Hebrew.)

18

Tran Van Thuy’s Story of Kindness Spirituality and Political Discourse Dean Wilson

The 1987 Vietnamese documentary Story of Kindness (Chuyen tu te), written and directed by Tran Van Thuy, stands out in the catalogue of state studio productions even today. Although the film seems to represent a spiritual journey from a subjective and critical point of view bordering on dissent, like all documentary production within the government system of controls Kindness was and remains an articulation of policy. Deriving most of its energy from an unusual embrace of contradictions, at the time of its initial public exhibition Kindness nonetheless adhered to a socialist documentary model of ideological instruction and reinforced the single-party political discourse in Vietnam at a moment of profound change, namely, the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the start of Renovation (Doi moi) in Vietnam. This essay attempts to reconcile some of the divergent threads Kindness generates, first by briefly examining the director’s career and the circumstances that brought his documentary to the screen, then by exploring the film’s narrative. Spirituality in Vietnam takes complex syncretic manifestations, and political discourse tends to envelop the entire linguistic sphere under the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). Tran assembled a dense array of voices that emphasize concepts of spirituality, often indirectly or by omission, and framed them within an unresolved pattern of firstperson digressions. Although the film resembles a quixotic personal essay, as a state studio production it served the political discourse of the era. Policies of self-­criticism and integration were important priorities for the CPV at the crucial transition ­during glasnost-perestroika.

A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



Tran Van Thuy’s Story of Kindness

385

State Documentary Tradition Shot in grainy color over a two-year period starting in 1985 with first-person narration that threads together a series of character profiles and interviews, the 43-minute Story of Kindness nominally takes the moral pulse of its time, much the way Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin did with Chronicle of a Summer in 1961. In a heuristic quest to understand the meaning of “kindness,” Tran and his film crew set out to honor the last wishes of their deceased colleague from the state studio, Dong Xuan Thuyet. The film combines a variety of techniques, including staged scenes where Tran and his crew appear onscreen, reversal images, assemblage, unusual camera positions, long and short lenses, hand-held cinema vérité, ethnographic footage, sound effects, ironic musical choices, and a sequence of anonymous interviews. As Tran and his film wander from scene to scene, the narration ruminates through an associative pattern of metaphysical digressions calling on viewers to be more kind, without actually using the Buddhist rhetoric of “compassion.” It was stylistically radical at the time, and signaled a change in how the state documentary studio engaged the new era. Apart from a handful of French colonial newsreels covering the funeral of the Vietnamese Emperor Nguyen Khai Dinh and his 10-year-old son’s enthronement in 1926, Vietnamese documentary filmmaking began when Ho Chi Minh traveled to France seeking to avert war with the occupying power. A young cameraman followed him and captured images of the legendary leader giving speeches, negotiating, and sightseeing a year after the end of the Second World War. The French would not leave Vietnam until they had been thoroughly routed at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and the years leading up to that battle saw the start of a documentary tradition based on patriotic resistance. Self-taught filmmakers Mai Loc and Khuong Me from Saigon moved north to shoot battle footage and re-enactments outside Hanoi, and an energetic ad hoc distribution system emerged to inspire the indigenous population. Defense of the ancestral homeland rendered the resistance a “sacred war” that drew upon earlier campaigns to expel the Chinese occupation in the tenth century and repel the Mongol invasions 300 years later. The state documentary studio of Vietnam was launched in 1953 with help from the Soviet Union, most notably from director Roman Karmen who stayed long enough to shoot historic events and assemble captured French footage. His remarkable collaborative film on the Dien Bien Phu victory catapulted the studio to a new status.1 Once the French had left the North a new phase began whereupon Vietnam was politically divided. In the south, the patriotic documentary tradition continued with guerilla tactics used by filmmakers dispatched from Hanoi. At the same time, an alternate paradigm emerged with support from the United States in Saigon, and for nearly 20 years this bifurcation grew increasingly divergent as the conflict with America escalated and ideological struggle became the norm. With the complete withdrawal of the US military in 1975, the centralized system of Vietnamese production congealed into a Soviet-style uniformity. Historically, this period known as the Subsidy era (Bao cap) lasted for roughly 10 years, during which time the Vietnam

386

Dean Wilson

State Enterprise for Documentary and Scientific Film in Hanoi focused on ideological education, and a second documentary studio opened in late 1975 in Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City. The state studio tradition expanded its role within the international community of socialist filmmakers, film schools, and festivals, most notably in Cuba and the Eastern Bloc, as the country faced the abject wake of back-to-back wars. Vietnam continued to fight at its borders with Cambodia and China for several more years, which exacerbated the effects of trade embargoes and rendered the CPV ever more insular. The concept of the sacred war and the spirituality of the ancestral lands were eclipsed during the Subsidy era by the rhetoric of progress, science, and collective programs. To control the political influence of Buddhists, the CPV instituted the Vietnam Buddhist Sangha, consolidating numerous sects and banishing others in 1981. The same year, Tet Offensive architect and economic reformer Nguyen Van Linh was expelled from the CPV Central Committee after protracted arguments with hardliner Party Secretary Le Duan. After years of strict controls over spiritual practices often labeled superstitious by party hardliners, in March 1985 the government inaugurated a Religious Affairs Committee to monitor the domestic practice of Buddhism and Catholicism, as well as the array of Confucian, Taoist, and animist traditions, including tutelary deities, geomancy, astrology, divination, and others too numerable to mention (Soucy, 2003: 126, 132). But this was ironically a turning point in a number of respects, as the command economy descended further into chaos and the Soviet Union withdrew economic and ­military aid. A devastating currency crisis occurred, and inflation reached 1000 percent. Soviet loyalist Le Duan died in July of 1985, leaving a vacuum of power, and after the failure of the command economy, Nguyen Van Linh was soon ­readmitted and appointed General Secretary of the CPV at the Sixth Congress in December 1986. Concurrent with Vaclav Havel’s 1986 essay collection Living in Truth, the Sixth CPV Congress was accompanied with banners and pamphlets declaring “Look at the Truth, Say the Truth, Appreciate the True Worth of the Truth,” “Untie the Artists,” “Artists, save yourselves before God does,” “Don’t bend your pen, write what you think.” These were radical expressions for the Hanoi cultural community after 30 years of orthodoxy and extreme punishments for dissent. Deputy Minister of Culture Tran Do, a key military general during the 1968 Tet Offensive, authored Resolution No. 5, which established new cultural priorities under the policy of Renovation.2 Leading his inaugural policy session during the congress, Nguyen Van Linh delivered the resolution with fanfare. The Sixth Congress began the era known as Renovation (Doi moi) and the furtive process of Vietnam reconnecting to the market economies of the world. This was the setting for Tran Van Thuy’s landmark documentary Story of Kindness, a film that would never have been possible during the Subsidy era. Citizens of Vietnam could now worship, pray, engage spirit mediums and fortune tellers, as they had for centuries, and a new era of cultural research began. An advocate of limited private enterprise and a proponent of cultural renewal, Nguyen



Tran Van Thuy’s Story of Kindness

387

was clearly someone who could restore legitimacy to the party at a time of ­international crisis. Officials loyal to Le Duan comprised a more orthodox faction however and their dialectical exchange with reformers has characterized Vietnamese politics since December 1986. Although Vietnam has been a single-party state by law since 1975, if it was to survive the various crises of 1985, the CPV needed to ­construct a more responsive image. By drawing upon spiritual traditions and moral ­provocations, Kindness enacts the Renovation policy of Criticism/Self-Criticism (kiem thao) i­nitiated at the Sixth Congress when the head of the CPV’s powerful Ideology ­subcommittee Truong Chinh opened with a statement acknowledging mistakes (Kim, 2007; Pike, 1987; Williams, 1986).

An Intriguing Career Tran Van Thuy began his career as an anthropologist in the northwestern region of Vietnam, living among ethnic minorities for five years with no experience at all with cameras. He was then selected for a special war cinematography training program. After only eight months he was stationed far below the 17th parallel in War Zone 5, an area of South Vietnam extending from Danang down to Nha Trang that included the Central Highlands. From 1966 to 1970, without military status, he witnessed intense warfare. Many of his colleagues died from starvation, suffocation in tunnels, disease, or injury. Tran captured footage at that time that he later edited into a film called Folks in My Home (Những người dân quê tôi, 1970). The Hanoi government submitted this roughly 20-minute short to the Leipzig documentary festival, where it won second prize in a crowded field of submissions from hundreds of aspiring socialist filmmakers. Legendary director Roman Karmen presented the award and soon thereafter endorsed Tran for study under his supervision at VGIK in Moscow. The young Vietnamese director attended courses there from 1971 to 1977 and made two more short films, one in Siberia and one in Cuba; both films won student awards in Moscow, Leipzig, and Warsaw.3 Returning to Hanoi in 1977, he joined the directing staff at the Central Enterprise for Documentary and Scientific Film, the state documentary studio. His first assignment was to direct a feature-length documentary about the northern border conflict with China called Betrayal (Phan boi, 1979), which won the top documentary film award at the 1980 Vietnam Film Festival, now a significant venue of the socialist film culture. Betrayal included interviews with Chinese prisoners of war and montage techniques that heightened polemical effects and demonstrated violations to Vietnamese sovereignty. By that time, Tran had attracted an international network of supporters that included big names like Santiago Alvarez. With such bona fide CPV credentials, he was assigned in 1980 to direct a script written by Dao Trong Khanh with the purpose of promoting tourism in Hanoi. Five City Gates of Hanoi (Ha Noi nam cua o) presented traditional clothing, handicrafts, landscapes, and historical sites of the fabled past. The cultural premise could have potentially offended the CPV orthodoxy and was therefore placed in the reliable hands of the celebrated young director.

388

Dean Wilson

Once he started to visit locations, however, the neglect, damage, and extreme poverty that surrounded him led the director to consult with scholars Nguyen Vinh Phuc and Tran Huy Ba. He subsequently decided to “stop trying to make a film about landscape beauty when it had disappeared.” He focused instead on “real things that were needed for today – typical values of how to keep peace and govern the country,” the latter notion inviting controversy (Tran, 2009). The resulting film, Hanoi in One’s Eyes (Ha Noi trong mat ai, 1982) recounts, in voice-over, the legends of virtuous kings, vassals, and female poets who forbade bribery, sought to educate the population, remained circumspect in victory, listened intently to the expressed concerns of the common people and enacted just rewards. Onscreen, the images of dilapidated sites insinuated current affairs by analogy, a technique found in contemporary fiction of the era (Zinoman, 1994: 296). Hanoi in One’s Eyes was screened and debated extensively before being rejected by hardliners for distribution, despite the prime minister’s personal approval. Starting in late 1982, Tran was followed wherever he went, and police were stationed at the entrance to his home. Some highranking officials worried that he was collaborating with counterrevolutionary foreign partners, and he was effectively prohibited from working until 1985, when he began Story of Kindness.

Production and Reception Tran was assigned as one of two writer-directors for a project called From Human Suffering in the fall of 1985, a few months after Le Duan died. The proposal was ­submitted by a former army officer named Ho Tri Pho, who worked in the screenwriting section of the state studio. Both names appear onscreen in the opening title sequence, but Tran was clearly the more dominant figure. It was important for Ho to submit the proposal because Tran had been blacklisted. Suffering was an innocuous reportage on leprosy treatments in Vietnam and was easily approved. Shortly thereafter, another director at the studio named Dong Xuan Thuyet was diagnosed with cancer. Tran then decided to change direction and started shooting Dong in his hospital bed. Though leprosy appears in Kindness, the decline, death, and burial of Dong in May 1987 set the film on its spiritual trajectory. Circulating through the city of Hanoi on foot or on bicycles, Tran spent the first six months supplementing footage of the dying filmmaker with ad hoc individual profiles of working people, a brickmaker, a single mother with leprosy, a pedal cab driver, a bicycle repairman, a vegetable vendor, and the camera operator who shot most of the film. Though he did take his crew south to visit the leprosarium in Qui Hoa, much of Kindness assembles images from archives, sites in Hanoi, and nondescript locations where more than 20 interview respondents address the camera, for the most part in centered medium close-ups. Tran’s engagement with sympathetic people in positions of power strongly influenced the evolution of the narrative, particularly his friendship with Deputy Minister of Culture Tran Do and writer Nguyen Khai, who was the head of the



Tran Van Thuy’s Story of Kindness

389

powerful Writers’ Association. Their thoughts and those of many others permeate Kindness without attribution. Tran’s progress was expedited after Tran Do orchestrated a screening of the director’s blacklisted film, Hanoi in One’s Eyes, for the party secretary Nguyen Van Linh in July 1987. Nguyen subsequently approved the film for distribution with an official letter, effectively removing Tran from the CPV blacklist. To accelerate work on Kindness, Tran added hand-held vérité footage of impoverished people in the capital city. The inserted sequences alarmed studio administrators and threatened to derail the final edited version. Emboldened by support beyond the studio level, Tran composed the provocative narration and added voice-over and music only a few days before hastily ordering five release prints with sound. His friendships with technical staff after eight years at the studio, enabled him to obtain prints more rapidly than his detractors’ efforts to delay screenings. Though the studio rejected the film for distribution, Tran circumvented the immediate authorities and officials at higher levels approved special screenings. The trigger for his haste was a large conference later in 1987 where Nguyen Van Linh requested a sequel to the newly approved 1982 film. Kindness therefore includes the words “Part II” in the title sequence. Curiosity over the banned film bolstered attendance at screenings for high-ranking military personnel and a number of official organizations, like the Writers’ Association and the Cinema Association. Still, the domestic reception of Kindness remains an enigma. Tran claims it was a popular success and that dozens of prints were made for irrepressible demand across the country. And while Kindness did obtain permission to be screened, it was not released by Fafim, the exclusive state film distributor (Lai, 2003: 55).4 During the transition years of Renovation, private distribution had not yet started and no box office records or domestic reviews have been located to date. The most likely scenario is that Tran distributed Kindness himself through government groups and instigated conversations to get more people to attend screenings. Starting in October 1987, Kindness screened for all the big agencies in the major cities of Vietnam, including organizations for postal and rail workers, the major ministries, science and education institutes, party organizations, and youth clubs. Leading up to the Vietnam Film Festival in March 1988, a significant conversation had emerged around Kindness that included Tran’s international friends, but the orthodox factions of the party had reasserted authority by then, and even Nguyen Van Linh had modified his positions on culture (Stern, 1993: 4, 74, 172). At the eighth Vietnam Film Festival in March 1988, all three Golden Lotus awards for director, screenplay, and cinematography in the documentary category went to Hanoi in One’s Eyes, Tran Van Thuy’s film from 1982. The awards resonated with political significance since Kindness had been screening for the past six months and was listed in the festival program. Without notice, festival organizers had decided behind closed doors not to screen it. Foreign guests, led by celebrated documentarian Santiago Alvarez from Cuba and representatives from the Leipzig documentary festival in East Germany, complained vigorously in writing and the neglected film was projected once for special visitors, but no Vietnamese nationals

390

Dean Wilson

were permitted to attend. In a complex paradigm of how the CPV understood its relationship with the general population and the outside world at that pivotal moment in history, this episode was emblematic. The government was not willing to publicly endorse Kindness to its own citizenry but found it useful as a form of cultural exchange. In a further twist, when the Leipzig festival selected Kindness for competition later that year, the Vietnamese government informed Tran that he would be allowed to attend the festival but his film could not. Upon arrival at his hotel in Leipzig, security police from the Vietnamese embassy entered the director’s room and threatened him with reprisals if the film screened as scheduled in the festival program. Having gone through extensive customs and security checks, Tran claimed no knowledge of the prints or their availability. Nevertheless, the film did screen to a standing ovation, winning the Silver Dove prize at Leipzig in 1988.5 Tran furtively left for Paris, where Kindness screened at the Cinéma du réel festival a few months later and won the top award. During his stay in Paris, Tran secured an international licensing deal with Icarus Films, which led to television broadcasts in the United Kingdom, Australia, France, and Japan, as well as VHS sales to libraries and archives. He made two more documentary films for Channel Four in the UK soon after. Since the early 1990s, Tran has toured universities and screened his films numerous times in the United States. Kindness was useful for the state studio both financially and ideologically, and Tran enjoyed lucrative engagements from his foreign admirers. He was perceived as a dissident while at the same time articulating the state policy promoting integration. Beneath the surface, however, Kindness represented an ambivalent dialogue between factions within the CPV.

Subjective and Collective Voices The director and his film occupy a rare space in the Vietnamese documentary history, having successfully penetrated the markets and public discourse of the West at a pivotal moment in world history. From its inception, the process of making Kindness resembled a tightrope walk through stormy weather, since Tran was ostensibly under house arrest in 1985 when the project began. His intrepid efforts cultivated a myth around his personality, one that he encourages, and much of the film’s more recent appeal, at least for foreign viewers, lies in the probing reflexivity of its subjective address. Though few Vietnamese have heard of the film today, Kindness remains a persistent reference point for cultural historians demarcating the parameters of the Renovation period (Freeman, 1991: 479, Bradley, 2003: 217). But the film also embodies a collective sensibility in its accumulation of individual voices and persistent critical statements that interweave the political discourse of the period. The syncretism of Vietnamese spirituality lends Kindness an iconoclastic aura at odds with the prevailing authoritarian controls of the Religious Affairs Committee. The currency crisis and widespread hardship were primary motivations for Tran’s



Tran Van Thuy’s Story of Kindness

391

choices, underscoring spirituality and ethics in the political discourse. During the Subsidy period the CPV had been strict in enforcing controls over cultural production and folkloric systems of belief, in order to advance the collectivist ideology it shared with the Soviet Union. Kindness, on the other hand, accumulates subjective experiences and multiplies points of view. It encourages viewers to identify with the filmmakers onscreen and the slate of individuals whose stories transpire in associational patterns. Instead of the state studio tradition depicting comrades building the bright future of Vietnam, the people onscreen are most often struggling individuals or Tran and his crew mulling over ethical quandaries. At times, the narration becomes ironic, a capital taboo in the state industry of generating positive images, particularly in a period of protracted armed conflict, environmental catastrophe, widespread poverty, and increasing desperation. “When human dignity is degraded it is difficult to behave kindly and to sustain higher thoughts.” Scenes of an elderly man in tattered clothing introduce the story of a war hero reduced to repairing bicycles on the street. The narrator intones, “A man who has eight wounds in his body is very familiar with physical pain. But physical pain, although it’s as real as trying to escape hunger, is nothing compared to the spiritual pain of thinking about family, people and country” (31:04). The wounded war hero projects a variety of collective national experiences and suggests a failure of leadership. At another point, the filmmakers have been summarily told to “go away” when they try to interview a destitute brickmaker who assails them, imploring “aren’t you ashamed of making up stories?” As we observe Tran and his crew dejectedly leaving the rural scene on foot, the narration explains, “We’ve been ashamed many times, Mr. Brickmaker.” The segment continues explaining that the filmmakers suffer from an “incurable habit”: “We only want to please our bosses.” Dialogical sequences escalate the subtext of Criticism/Self-Criticism by accumulating subjective points of view. Over street scenes of poverty, the narrator bristles at the “terrifying trend” of the poor disappearing from artworks “as if they had disappeared into another world.” Kindness then abruptly cuts to an interview subject who proclaims, “For me, ignorance is even more terrifying … Ignorance was best described by the founder of communism as the force of the Devil.” Yet another cut to an interview subject continues, “If one enters into this kind of discussion about ignorance and wisdom there’s no way out. … The struggle for better living conditions is the struggle to preserve human dignity” (29:08). Kindness revels in broad ethical, folkloric statements like these, linking them together by key words in a meandering stream of associations. To a degree, Kindness openly criticized the government and introduced spiritual content that had not been part of the state documentary tradition in Vietnam. Though tame by Western standards, under the Vietnamese system of controls Kindness evoked an audacious type of self-expression, one that positioned Tran as an auteur in the eyes of foreign viewers. Kindness had the contours of a personal work of art, as in the essay films of Chris Marker that called into question “the ideological impact of authorial or stylistic choices” (Renov, 1993: 32). When production began in 1985, the state documentary studio had no personal works of art in its

392

Dean Wilson

catalogue – save, perhaps, Tran’s banned film from 1982 – and little in the way of an ethnographic tradition. Prior to December 1986, the party labeled spiritual ­traditions and folklore as backward and superstitious vestiges of the feudal past. In this context, Kindness represented a new direction for cultural policy in Vietnam, where spirituality returned as a mechanism of national identity. As a reflexive text, Kindness refers to itself as a government representation and contrasts the elite subjectivity of the narration with the people onscreen. By the summer of 1988 Tran had secretly conspired to smuggle prints of Kindness to the Leipzig festival and feared for his life when it screened. The director fled to Paris like a fugitive, not knowing the results of the competition. Without winning awards or negotiating a distribution deal with Icarus, which paid revenues to the state studio, he would not have been able to return to Vietnam. And yet, his travel itinerary was facilitated and organized at the cabinet level, and this inconsistency reveals the ongoing factional dispute within the party. Though Tran may have had a certain degree of protection, the perceived controversy surrounding Kindness served the consolidation of power, neutralizing potential dissent and reasserting the political discourse of the CPV.

Authorship and Political Discourse Tran’s 1982 film Hanoi in One’s Eyes incensed the orthodox officials with its didactic commentary on governance. Referencing tutelary deities, shrines, heroic ancestors, literary traditions, and the mythological powers of geography and architecture, Tran aroused suspicions. In a similar critical vein but with a shift in emphasis, Story of Kindness confronted contemporary society with moral quandaries that achieved the sort of drama of every day life championed by John Grierson during the Great Depression. Tran evoked spirituality through provocations, associative patterns, and character profiles. Ethics are intimately aligned with traditional village life in Vietnam, and a syncretic discourse of beliefs has shaped the construction of Vietnamese national identity since the 1920s (Taylor, 2007; Duong, 1993; Marr, 1986). In this sense Kindness represents a form of pragmatism under the edifice of socialist power. The film both served and criticized the single-party state at a time of national crisis. Although Kindness progresses like a personal diary, the combination of voices yields a collective interpretation of authorship. In a sequence openly critical of party rhetoric, we see a small troop of soldiers marching in formation, filmed through a short lens that distorts the space and movements with a carnivalesque fish-eye. Inserts of government buildings from the Subsidy era with their placards appear as the narrator speaks to official invocations of “The People.” People … How sacred that word is. It’s used everywhere … “Comrades, let’s forget ourselves for the people. Let’s sacrifice ourselves for the people.” Many slogans were instilled into people’s minds. For instance, “Serve the people,” “Respect the people as you would your own parents.” (10:33)



Tran Van Thuy’s Story of Kindness

393

The repetition seems sarcastic and therefore critical, but Kindness hides the source of criticism, in this case Deputy Minister of Culture Tran Do, who often made such remarks to the film director. In a similar instance of borrowed content, a later statement about humankind striving for unattainable goals “such as perfection, infinity, and eternity,” conceptual terms invoking spirituality, were the words of writer Nguyen Khai. The Kindness narration contains hundreds of quotations, destabilizing the auteur status of the director, and redirecting sources of criticism to a safe distance. The film quotes former president Ho Chi Minh, the founder of the CPV, who attained the status of a deity when he died in 1969. His embalmed corpse was placed on display in a mausoleum, combining political, spiritual, and entertainment values in the death of a legendary figure. The narration continues with an analogy of filial piety and a citation from Ho Chi Minh. You look after your old father, care for him when he’s sick, venerate him after his death and bring his unfulfilled ambitions to fruition. Filial piety must be expressed through actions. You can’t let your parents beg for food and say you’re a devoted child. As for devotion to the people, its meaning and its cause have even greater significance. Old Ho taught us … (echo and reverb) “Whatever position you hold you always have to be the servant of the people. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the things we use all come from the sweat and tears of the people. Therefore, they have to be recompensed.” Persons of good conscience should admit that that’s not always the case.

The metonymical link between “old” Ho and “your old father” when commenting on filial piety is further consolidated by an onscreen image of an elderly Vietnamese man who resembles Ho Chi Minh walking through a flowered park with a small boy who appears to be preschool age. The citation processed by echo and reverb occurs with an image of government officials being dropped off by cars at a red carpet ministry entrance with the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum in the background. In a double entendre the officials onscreen figuratively represent an ironic contrast to the expressed ideals of the late Ho Chi Minh, while the narration positions the filmmakers, who are also government employees, as “persons of good conscience.” Though the implication in this scene is critical of political corruption, it simultaneously acknowledges mistakes, enacting the Renovation policy of Criticism/Self-Criticism while drawing on Neo-Confucian ancestral traditions. Kindness presents a number of onscreen quotations from Karl Marx, some with onscreen text. The narrator attributes the aphorism “The happiness of man lies in making other men happy” to Marx, then more stridently credits Marx with a statement comparing people who “busy themselves looking after their own skins” to animals. Neither of these quotes is cited from its source material, and the party prohibited public interpretations of Marx. Contextualizing the words of Marx was reserved for authorities with status, and in order to appear in a film they would have to be already widely in use, as would any attribution to Ho Chi Minh.

394

Dean Wilson

The fluid message conveyed with these quotes was embraced as part of the political discourse, but its moral provocation was nonetheless derived from Vietnamese spirituality.

Intertext and National Identity In 1987 the CPV needed to expand the acceptable boundaries of national identity in order to retain power and begin the long process of global integration. Kindness provided the doubly rich ideological education that repositioned spiritual traditions of the ancestral homeland within a Marxist-Leninist political discourse that would neutralize dissent. The film opens with the professional male voice of the narrator, radio personality Tran Duc, declaring: Once, in a discussion about filmmaking, an annoyed friend reproached me in an odd way. “Only animals turn away from human suffering and busy themselves looking after their own skins.” That is a merciless and inadmissible statement. I doubt if it was his own. He probably borrowed it from somewhere. (00:19)

The moral provocation on suffering, mercy, reliability, and originality calls upon viewers to be skeptical of filmmakers from the outset. Tran imparts a form of naked honesty that dramatizes the reflexive, metatheatrical dimension of government self-criticism. Over an introductory montage of scenes that appear later in the film, baleful piano music begins and the narration escalates the provocation with the didactic tone of a Confucian vow. The editor of this film said that our ancestors had always taught us that kindness was present in every person, every family, in every generation and every nation. Let us patiently awaken to this knowledge and place it on our ancestral altars and national monuments. A community will never achieve anything without this knowledge, no matter how it strives or how high its ideals. Let us show our children and our adults too how to live kindly as human beings before laying plans for them and training them to be men of power, talent and genius. (01:08)

In a thematic textual match, the recited passage begins with the editor’s credit onscreen as the montage of later scenes continues. The narration asserts a grandiose nationalist ideology of kinship and then calls upon viewers to instruct by example. This opening passage echoes the Criticism/Self-Criticism campaign and two other doctrines of the CPV reforms initiated in 1986. One was the Emulation (thi đua) campaign and the other was the practice of organizing Information Liaison Groups. These were ways the party imparted ideological correctness, especially to new recruits (Shinn, 1987). Revealing his intertextual technique from the outset, Tran’s rhetoric in this opening passage draws upon a wealth of folklore, the words of his friends, and echoes three branches of CPV ideological reform. The narration



Tran Van Thuy’s Story of Kindness

395

conforms to state policy while informing viewers that ancestry is a meaningful source of knowledge, not superstition, and therefore a permissible form of spirituality in the Renovation construct of national identity. Circumscribing the purpose of the film as ideological education, Tran draws a parallel between the “ancestral alters” and “national monuments” of Vietnam, in effect politicizing spirituality by intertextual figuration.

Narrative Density and Spiritual Symbolism We learn about the death of Dong Xuan Thuyet, the documentary film director who dies of cancer, with images of the film crew visiting his grave. According to tradition, they arrive on the first anniversary of his passing, and the date is given according to the lunar calendar. The members of the film crew stand around the burial mound and light bundles of joss sticks before placing them with flowers on the grave. A series of still photographic portraits of other filmmakers from the studio who had recently died of cancer ensues, like memorial icons with each name ceremoniously recited by the narrator, before the film moves to the hospital bed of the man whose grave we just visited, prior to his death. In the throes of pain, from his hospital bed, the dying man reads a passage from a novel by Georgian author Nodar Dumbadze. An indicative change in the profilmic register records his speech live with synchronized sound: My body has been racked with pain recently but in those moments when I’ve been able to read I’ve found this book very meaningful. Listen to this paragraph. “A man’s spirit is a hundred times heavier than his body so that one man alone cannot carry it. We should help one another through life so that our spirits can become immortal. You help my spirit towards immortality, I help another, it helps yet another and so on to infinity. Then the death of a man will not leave us in solitude.” Isn’t it extraordinary? (03:10)

For emphasis, the narration repeats this statement with onscreen text, adding echo and reverb to the voice-over recording. The citation references immortality and infinity, enshrined in a collective psychology that reinforces the ideals of socialism through a work of fiction. Dumbadze won the Lenin Prize for Literature in 1980, the Soviet Union’s most prestigious literary award. He was therefore a politically safe reference. The sequence continues documenting Dong Xuan Thuyet’s decline and last request, again recorded with synchronized sound, wherein he challenges his colleagues to “do something together, something that is inspired by human love, or something about man’s suffering.” He adds, with ambivalent humor, “You must do it. If you don’t, I’ll drag you down below with me.” A common Vietnamese belief is that the dead continue to influence events among the living, particularly the extended family, so his statement carried a degree of supernatural credibility. When the ­filmmakers enact their quixotic search for kindness, an associative pattern of ­anonymous interviews overlays their encounters. A young woman explains that

396

Dean Wilson

kindness is the “consolation of life. Only lepers live alone without kindness.” The narrator reacts with fatalistic irony. “Lepers! As ugly as a leper. As dirty as a leper. As lazy as a leper. Don’t mix with the lepers!” (15:12). In a rueful tone the narrator laments these stigmatizing expressions, and the filmmakers discover an unnamed single mother who was abandoned by her husband after being diagnosed with leprosy. Like all the character profiles the film incorporates – in contrast to the segment with the dying filmmaker – her segment is presented in the narration instead of using her actual words with synchronized sound, a dramatizing technique that enhances identification with the first-person narrator. The segment shifts from real-time color images of the boy to staged scenes in negative reversal depicting his mother’s past. The mother wades into black water and then appears making bricks as the audio shifts to sounds of marsh insects and reptiles. In a typically strident and associative passage, we learn that she built a house for her son and kept a diary. Which of you healthy and kind people could do that? 18,000 bricks, at night, a chilling wind, her pain … As the house was taking shape Little Chien’s mother, leper with a poetic soul, decided after a dream to set down her thoughts for her son. (16:12)

This time the provocation addresses the audience and transfers the leper’s shame upon people who might think themselves kind. What’s more, she was a dreamer, a poetic soul, and a writer. We observe her son reading her diary, as the narration expands these associations further. Her book contained poems and photos of Alexander Blok as well as her own poems in her clumsy hand. “The flimsy hut shivers in an icy wind. The poor cradle shakes in the winter’s night” (17:08). The Russian Symbolist poet Alexander Blok in this context resonates with spiritual symbolism and a particular strand of socialist ideology. A complex figure often compared to Pushkin, Blok migrated from mysticism and aestheticism to a coarse expressionist language and revolutionary themes. He languished unable to conform to political absolutism but remained a staunch nationalist and patriot. He is clearly a figure of emulation for the virtuous mother, who we learn was healed, in part by faith. “But we must believe in the Creator’s kindness. Chien’s mother was cured by devoted doctors. Often as she walked along the Tra Ly River she thought of them and cried” (04:57). Kindness here begins to expose its literary aspirations through the character of the mother. At the same time, the narration invokes monotheistic traditions and introduces the experience of faith as a permissible spiritual symbol under the CPV. By association, it pursues these themes further at the seaside leprosarium in Qui Hoa. The segment at Qui Hoa begins with a scene of doctors mingling on a terrace before a large house. A sequence of frontal portraits follows, then close-ups of maligned limbs, doctors and nurses performing treatments. With portraits of the Catholic nurses, the narration emphasizes their devotion, escalating the theme of faith. They are paragons of devoted service, unequivocal symbols of spirituality, as the narrator exclaims with free indirect discourse:



Tran Van Thuy’s Story of Kindness

397

Sisters, what brought you to serve the lepers with such serenity and devotion? It’s the faith that all of us have followed. Yes, people cannot live together without faith. Ancient faith in religion and the divinities has led man to a belief in well-founded and truthful things. Faith is natural and powerful. Faith cannot be borrowed, imposed or torn away by force. When one loses faith, one loses everything. (22:05)

The sequence follows two of the nurses to the grave of the celebrated Catholic Modernist poet Han Mac Tu (1912–1940), where they place alms and flowers. Han had been diagnosed with leprosy and died at the Qui Hoa facility. Parallel literary themes cascade through the figures of Dumbadze, Blok, Han, and other writers. Catholic nuns mourning a religious but formally innovative poet in a state documentary production presented new acceptable boundaries for cultural production in Vietnam. The narrator explains that the older nuns remembered him personally, and that ignorance led most people to be cruel to lepers. Widespread outpouring of affection for the poet when he became ill demonstrated the kindness of his era. As a rhetorical presence in the Kindness narrative, Han Mac Tu represents Vietnamese genius and the political debate over culture. His work was lionized in Hanoi by literary scholar Phan Cu De beginning in the late 1960s, indicating this reverence was not new when the film was made. The segment connotes established policy of the Religious Affairs Commitee and Vietnam National University, where Phan Cu De taught. Contrary to the perception of dissent, Kindness informed viewers that the state acknowledged Catholics. The call to faith, reverence toward ancestors, references to the “Creator,” and virtuous poets all bolster the film’s rhetorical mode of moral education and syncretic spirituality. The Qui Hoa segment ends by proclaming the pre-eminence of faith for humanity with images of fishermen gathering their nets on the beach intercut with shots looking out to sea, calling to mind the celebrated biblical “fishers of men” passage from Matthew 4:19 and dramatizing the spiritual symbolism of the Vietnamese landscape. Circulating througout the narrative is a dialectical progression of thought that confronts the purpose of filmmaking as an allegory of socialist authority. Near the end of the film, we observe barefoot peasants pulling carts by the roadside from the perspective of the filmmakers driving by in a car. Inserts of them appear wearing sunglasses, chewing gum, smoking as German pop music plays. Here we see the director Tran Van Thuy lounging in the back seat as the narrator denotes an existential quandary. … like all of us here, who would be stupid enough to reject comfort and power in order to live the life of common people? Herein lies the paradox. Despite all our efforts and sorrows, what we, the filmmakers, have finally learnt is but a drop of water. What we still don’t know is an ocean. (41:39)

The spiritual and political symbol of the filmmakers’ heuristic quest metonymically expands to an undiscovered “ocean” of common people. In what appears to be a veiled reference to the concurrent memoir of expelled dissident Hoang Van Hoan

398

Dean Wilson

published in Beijing, A Drop in the Ocean: Hoang Van Hoan’s Revolutionary Reminiscences, the sequence proposes empathy and a vicarious interaction with the unfortunate members of society but resigns the filmmakers to a brand of elitism that dramatizes the film’s reflexivity (Abuza, 2001: 246). In this instance of Self-Criticism, the filmmakers acknowledge their mistakes in public, conscious of how the film has improved their image in order to retain the status quo.

Conclusion Story of Kindness emerged from political discourse when Tran Van Thuy’s government allies promoted his spiritually provocative films. As part of an internal debate over Vietnamese national identity, Kindness generated an unusual cinematic space through international festivals, self-distribution, and screenings for government organizations. The allegorical screen presence of the film crew embraced the contradictions of Vietnamese socialist ideology at the precise moment of transition from the Subsidy to Renovation eras. Individual profiles combined with anonymous interview responses multiply subjective voices and complicated notions of authorship. Linking spiritual traditions and political discourse, Kindness achieved a narrative density which aspired to be interpreted as scriptible literary art through intertextual references and irony. The approximation of “kindness” (tử tế) and “compassion” (lòng từ bi) alluded indirectly to Buddhism, side-stepping the political ­volatility of the longest and most prominent religious practice in Vietnam. In recent years, however, the spiritual Renovation that first appeared in Kindness has become firmly institutionalized. A new national holiday for the mythological founders of Vietnam, the Hung Kings, and the expansion of the state-sanctioned Vietnam Buddhist Sangha are two prominent examples. In January 2013 the current General Secretary of the Communist Party Nguyen Phu Trong met with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican, and UNESCO has placed a number of cultural practices in Vietnam on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Documentary practice, most evidently in productions for the Vietnam state television service VTV, have fully embraced the subject matter of imperial and religious history, indigenous cults such as the Four Immortals, and a host of deities contributing to the syncretic amalgam of Vietnamese national identity in the twenty-first century.

Notes 1 The Vietnam Film Institute in Hanoi has at least three versions of the film by Roman ­Karmen, with later edits including maps, war strategy, and leadership profiles that air on television every year. 2 Once retired form public service, Tran Do was expelled from the CPV in 1999 after calling for political reform. In 2001, his memoirs were confiscated and he was placed



Tran Van Thuy’s Story of Kindness

399

under house arrest while being hospitalized. He died in August 2002. See http://cpj. org/2002/03/attacks-on-the-press-2001-vietnam.php, and https://cpj.org/2000/03/­attackson-the-press-1999-vietnam.php, both accessed August 1, 2014. 3 Interviews with Tran Van Thuy, Ho Tri Pho, Nguyen Van Long, October 2011 to March 2012. 4 Interviews with Luu Dang Hung, manager of new releases 1976–1988, and Phan Thi Cam Vinh, writer, both from Fafim. 5 An article in an unknown GDR journal appeared in December 1988 by writer Mathias Weile describing the Leipzig awards and events at the earlier festival in Vietnam. Tran Van Thuy provided a copy of the German manuscript.

References Abuza, Zachary (2001) Renovating Politics in Contemporary Vietnam. London: Lynne Rienner. Bradley, Mark P. (2003) Contests of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting War in the Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema. In Hue-Tam Ho Tai (ed.) The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press. Duong, Mac (1993) Religion in Its Relation to the Development of Society. Vietnam Social Sciences, 2(36): 17–20. Freeman, James M. and Nguyễn Ðình Hũ’u (1991) Video and Film Review – How to Behave. Journal of Asian Studies, 50(2), 479–481. Kim, Sung-Chull (2007) Transformation of National Strategy in Postwar Vietnam: Dependency to Engagement. International Journal of Korean Unification Studies, 16(1), 201–237. Lai, Van Sinh (2003) Lich Su Dien Anh Vietnam Quyen [History of Vietnamese Cinema]. Hanoi: Vietnam Cinema Department. Marr, David (1986) Religion in Contemporary Vietnam. In Miller, R.F. and Rigby, T.H. (eds.) Religion and Politics in Communist States, pp. 123–133. Canberra: Department of Political Science, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Pike, Douglas (1987) Vietnam: Mechanisms of Control. Library of Congress Country Studies, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field%28DOCID+vn0135%29, accessed August 2, 2014. Renov, Michael (ed.) (1993) Theorizing Documentary. New York: Routledge. Rouch, Jean (2003) Cine-Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shinn, Rinn-Sup (1987) Vietnam: Catholicism. Library of Congress Country Studies, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field%28DOCID+vn0059%29, accessed August 2, 2014. Soucy, Alexander (2003) Pilgrims and Pleasure-Seekers. In Drummond, Lisa and Thomas, Mandy (eds.) Consuming Urban Culture in Contemporary Vietnam, pp. 125–137. New York: Routledge. Stern, Lewis M. (1993) Renovating the Vietnamese Communist Party: Nguyen Van Linh and the Programme for Organizational Reform, 1987–1991. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Taylor, Philip (ed.) (2007) Modernity and Re-enchantment: Religion in Post-revolutionary Vietnam. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

400

Dean Wilson

Tran, Ngoc Kha (2009) Đao diện Trần Văn Thủy với ký ức “Hà Nội trong mắt ai” [Director Tran Van Thuy Remembers Hanoi in One’s Eyes]. TuanVietnam.net, December 26, http:// www.tuanvietnam.net/2009-12-25-dd-tran-van-thuy-voi-ky-uc-ha-noi-trong-mat-ai-, accessed August 2, 2014. Williams, Nick B. (1986) Vietnam Leader Criticizes Self, Others as Party Congress Starts. Los Angeles Times, December 16. Zinoman, Peter (1994) Declassifying Nguyen Huy Thiep. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 2(2), 294–317.

Part VII

War

Introduction War

Jeffrey Skoller

The rifle extends the human arm, allowing a person to strike another from a ­distance and with great accuracy. The photographic camera extends the human eye, allowing a person to see things at great distances up close, and to document events without being present. These inventions immediately transformed warfare. The technological developments of war are marked by the ever-increasing ability for one body to kill others and one country to destroy another’s territory from greater distances, with ever-greater devastation, while making it possible to see the results with great detail and in complete safety. The advances in technology that further tie the weapon and the camera in modern warfare range from projectiles shot further with more power and increasing accuracy, to bombs dropped from greater heights, to self-propelled “smart” missiles with computer tracking, to unmanned drones guided into territories by technicians in front of computer screens thousands of miles away. In all cases the greater the distance between bodies, the more abstract violence becomes. Alongside and through these high-tech remote weapons, the history of film has been inextricably intertwined with war, as photographic recording technologies developed with equal speed. Beginning with long exposure single images ­documenting the American Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century, to early handcranked motion picture footage of the First World War, the chronology of war as a visualizable and documentable phenomenon is marked by the increased ability to record movement, and an increased ability to transmit images and sound more quickly at greater distances and with higher resolution. During the Second World War, portable film cameras were embedded in fighting platoons and on aerial bombing A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

404

Jeffrey Skoller

missions, while war departments using film industry directors and technicians produced documentaries constructing their own image of war. During the Vietnam War, US network television journalists sent footage directly from the field that was broadcast daily. By the 1990s global live satellite coverage of the bombings marked the image of the Gulf War, and in the 2000s the minute-by-minute documentation of events via the Internet that was often shot by the soldiers themselves as they fought, marked the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Often imaging technologies that are integrated into weapons to monitor and find their targets are the very same technologies used to document the results. For example, technological developments for night vision devices such as thermal, infrared, and laser imaging technologies, unmanned robotic cameras and aerial drone surveillance for intelligence gathering and targeting the enemy for remote engagement are also integral parts of the image-gathering and documentation ­systems. One only has to remember the live night images of the bombing of Baghdad that looked like fireworks over Disneyland that began Operation Desert Storm in 1991, or the ghostly green images made by embedded journalists on military patrols searching homes in Iraqi neighborhoods to see the multiple uses of imaging technologies. Visual simulated military training systems in remote warfare are also used to document military operations. Such technologies are used in consumer video games, which like fiction films, produce another way of making the violence of war appear to be at once immediate and abstract. Questions about the ways war becomes an abstract spectacle of violence created by such mediatized documentation, are made even more complex by the geographic and cultural distances between warring countries which also transforms the nature and meanings of battle. Beyond the spatial distances that mark modern warfare, the temporality and scale of war’s representation also becomes part of the problem of abstraction, further contributing to the distanced phantasmagorical quality of the spectacle. During the first half of the twentieth century, documentary newsreels were projected onto the large screens to crowds in public movie theatres preceding the features. In these documentaries, voice-of-god narration was generally illustrated by silent black and white newsreel footage that could be framed and reframed to create any meanings the filmmakers (or military) wanted. What these works lacked in information or analysis – political or moral – of war at a distance, was displaced by a discourse of sobriety, built into the form of the films through images of death and destruction, somber tones enhancing the voices of authority narrating the films As Bill Nichols writes, a discourse of sobriety causes viewers to trust the “indexical linkage between what we see and what occurred before the camera” which in turn reinforces the authority and truth value of the commentary inscribing the images (Nichols, 2001: 38–39). As viewers saw these films outlining the progress of the war from the point of view of the international news associations and government war departments, they saw images of events that were often months old. The immediacy of war was always belated, events usually long over by the time they were seen abstracting the temporality of the images in relation to the lives of viewers.

Introduction 405 With the rise of television in the post-1945 period, this shifted, as war increasingly became a private experience, seen on small, low-resolution broadcast televisions. During the Vietnam–America War, often called the first television war, the cognitive dissonance between the overflow of images of the carnage of dead American soldiers and Vietnamese peasants and the experience of sitting in the safety of American living rooms produced a different kind of distance that perhaps allowed for a greater critical thinking. Those years of nightly broadcast of grainy hand-held color images, some say, turned a generation of young people against the war, as the reality of the draft and actually going to war introduced a shudder of the real into those faraway images. As Alisa Lebow argues in her essay “The Unwar Film” in this section, even the “anti-war” documentaries that emerged from the Second World War and achieved their apogee in the Vietnam War era have continued to blur the technologies of militarism and vision through the spectacle of violence. Rather than offering alternative ways of thinking war, they become part of the continuum of horror and atrocity they protest, often mystifying and abstracting the subjectivity of seeing and its relation to thought. With each war, the development of documentary image and sound technologies, coupled with the specific problems that filmmakers encounter as they document a particular war – geography, local cultures, military restrictions, understanding the nature of the conflict itself, and so on – has produced its own modes of recording and documenting the changing practices of warfare and its effects. Hence each war invents its own forms of representation; its documents become a recognizable visual lexicon and set of characteristic narrative forms that mark the war. One has only to see an image of the fleets of helicopters landing in rice paddies to think the Vietnam War, or the low-resolution black and white aerial images of tiny figures running from drones firing missiles at them to mark the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. These constitute their specific discourse, image of combat, trauma, destruction, victimization, victory. The changing forms of documentation continue to raise many of the same questions as did earlier films when it comes to the forms of the documentary war film: Can the experience of wars in the present be adequately represented visually in its full complexity? With emerging digital imaging technologies, during the Gulf wars the relationships between space, time, scale, and abstraction have become ever more complicated and contradictory. Conflicts are beamed live or within hours of the event represented and can be seen on high-resolution televisions from 60-inch flat screens to 4-inch mobile phones, viewed at any time of day from anywhere, whether in bed or at work. Every car bomb explosion, bombing raid, or deposed dictator hung or beaten to death by angry crowds, is recorded and instantly transmitted into the most intimate spaces of our lives. Inured to the steady stream of images, the sounds of warfare often become more vivid than the images of violence, the casualness of the image of a drone firing on unsuspecting people walking down a street, is also emphasized by the flat emotionless voices of the commanders authorizing they be fired on, and shooters happily congratulating each other for the hit. The mix of high velocity

406

Jeffrey Skoller

movement, suspense, graphic images of death, destruction as part of the display of cinematic and weapons technology, has made the war documentary an enduring genre in the history of the cinema as spectacle. The scholar Garrett Stewart warns of the problem of how to make meaning of the continuous flood of such violent images and sounds, impossible to narrate beyond the extraordinary technology that makes them visible: Narrative agency is subsumed to technology at every level, from aerial tracking, where characters are just faceless pawns on a monitoring grid, to eye-level confrontations, where any human posture toward an encroaching violence, from suspense to panic, often feels as virtual, as permeated by mediation, as computer interactivity in some low-resolution videogame. (Stewart, 2009: 45)

If Vietnam was the “first television war,” in which the images of that war on the other side of the planet were beamed into American living rooms, then the Iraq War is the YouTube War, as it was dubbed by Time magazine (Cox, 2006). The mix of distance and closeness for the soldiers operating digital drone technology with their designed-in-Hollywood videogame platforms on the one hand, and the proliferation of small personal digital cameras, cell-phone cameras, and high-definition video “camcorders” on the other, have created a new genre of war documentary in which the soldiers themselves are filming their own experiences from within the war. (For detailed discussions of the relationships between the entertainment industry and the military, and the aesthetics of video games and war, see Halter (2006) and Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009).) These images often become unruly, as they are instantly uploaded to open-view Internet sites and emailed across the globe, often going viral to be viewed by millions, disrupting the tight control of images of violence and abuses the military has tried to keep from the public. In addition to this open access, these materials have also been appropriated and structured – narrativized – in feature documentaries produced and shown on television and theatrically. Films that include material shot by soldiers themselves include The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton, US, 2006), Iraq Uploaded: The War Network TV Won’t Show You (MTV, 2006), Iraqi Short Films (Mauro Andrizzi, Argentina, 2008), and Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, US, 2008). In the face of mainstream journalists embedded with the occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, the range of independent documentaries made on these wars is unprecedented. Independent filmmakers, artists, and freelance journalists have been able to take small format camera and sound equipment of unparalleled image quality in their suitcases and fly directly to the areas of conflict, to make intimate portraits from inside the daily lives of Iraqis and Afghans. Documentary films, including Return to the Land of Wonders (Maysoon Pachachi, 2004), Baghdad in No Particular Order (Paul Chan, 2003), My Country, My Country (Laura Poitras, 2006), and Iraq in Fragments (James Longley, 2006), are unique works of direct cinema which attempt to humanize the occupied country through intimate portraits of Iraqi family life and of the daily struggles the war has created. These films use the

Introduction 407 i­ntimacy of the single camera and first-person encounter to create a prosaics of life during wartime, giving another account of how violence permeates daily life through the anxieties and uncertainties of not knowing what is going to happen, waiting for the next attack, raid, car bomb. If these films are an attempt to de-spectacularize war and show the toll it has taken from the point of view of the civilian population, the other extreme is the war documentary that represents the war from the perspective of the fighting soldier in battle or what scholar Patricia Aufderheide has called the Grunt Doc. This tradition which runs through the history of documentary film from The Battle of San Pietro of the Second World War (John Huston, 1945) to The Anderson Platoon of Vietnam (Pierre Schoendoerffer, 1968) portrays hardships and horrors of life and death on the battlefield from the point of view of heroic fighting soldiers risking everything for duty from within the platoon. Major films in this mode include Gunner Palace (Michael Tucker, US, 2004), Occupation: Dreamland (Ian Olds and Garrett Scott, US, 2005), Restrepo (Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, US, 2010), and Armadillo (Januz Metz, Denmark, 2010). The you-are-there Grunt Doc tradition continues in these contemporary films that are now able to produce an unprecedented level of intimacy, using the current ultra-light hand-held high-definition digital cameras that can film in nearly all lighting conditions, including at night. This technology allows for an unprecedented closeness and spontaneous interaction with the soldiers in interviews and conversations in the midst of battle. These films, although highly edited, create a gritty war-is-hell authenticity that, as Aufderheide suggests, is structured by a voyeuristic quest, the thrill of wondering if we will see someone get hurt or killed. The films thus depend on the most basic of plots, life and death, and they run the risk of pushing toward what some people, including Jill Godmilow, call emotional pornography. (Aufderheide, 2007: 59–60)

In her essay “The Unwar Film” Alisa Lebow argues that the focus on the tensions and individual survival of the ground soldiers becomes a displacement for the more difficult work of exploring the reasons why the war is being fought in the first place. The specific politics of the war give way to the more generalizing and politically agnostic “war is hell” discourse of the war film genre. The large number of American documentaries focusing on the returning American soldiers of the Middle East wars is also striking. Often used as an oblique way to critique the war in general, the films trace the problems of returning vets such as inadequate healthcare and the lack of legal recourse for crimes perpetrated against them. As variations on the Grunt Doc portraits of fighting soldiers, these are portraits of the returning soldier as war victim. These documentaries explore the plight of returning veterans, their traumas and attempts to remake their lives in the face of grave emotional and physical damage. The films transform returning soldiers from archetypal hero warriors into a social justice issue, the victims of the very system that sent them into battle. These films offer an explicit counter-context to the

408

Jeffrey Skoller

rough-hewn Grunt Doc. Often made with high production values and conventional character-driven plots, they become the after-image of the hyper-masculine invincible war hero, as they follow individual soldiers struggling to remake lives in the face of severe injuries and an often more sophisticated understanding of the war they fought. Body of War (Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue, 2007), for instance, follows the story of Iraq war veteran Tomas Young, who returned paraplegic and angry about being lied to about the nature of the war. Despite his devastating wounds, he becomes a national anti-war activist, speaking out against the war and for the needs of returning veterans. The Ground Truth (Patricia Foulkrod, 2006) features portraits of returning vets and their struggles with reintegration. The Invisible War (Kirby Dick, 2012) follows the struggles of several women veterans who were raped and sexually abused in the military to explore the rampant rape and impunity of sexual abuse within the US military. Kill Team (Dan Krauss, 2013) investigates war crimes committed by US soldiers through the case of a US war vet who tries to report that his platoon has been killing Afghan civilians for amusement. These emotionally fraught stories are the most conventionally journalistic of the new “digital docs” about the current wars, but they often contain the most politically potent explorations of the crimes and injustices they enact. Perhaps learning from the Vietnam War era’s demonization of returning vets, these films portray the struggle of returning vets sympathetically, but then use those portrayals as a strategic opening through which to openly criticize the abuses the vets took part in while fighting. In so doing, the films trade larger questions and polemics surrounding the reasons for the wars that are the hallmark of more militant and activist anti-war arguments for the performance of individual struggle and personal redemption. This brief overview of the contemporary documentaries of the Middle East wars is a way to contextualize the three essays that follow. Each essay is written by a contemporary film scholar who theorizes the crucial questions about the subjectivities in seeing war in the contemporary moment outlined above, and each focuses on a distinct range of cinematically formal and technological constructions that mark contemporary documentary filmmaking. They also suggest alternative approaches to the war documentary that allow for other ways of seeing and thinking about representations of war. In her essay “Second Thoughts on ‘The Production of Outrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition,’” film theorist Jane Gaines addresses the problem of the ubiquity of war images in contemporary life and how they are at once accessible and inaccessible as meaningful evidence able to help us think about the wars. Her essay explores “how we see what we see as well as what we make of the images that we see and what they make of us.” Gaines argues that despite the enormous image culture we exist in, images are still greeted with Platonic suspicion that keeps us from engaging fully with their meanings and political potential. In images of war and violence, the horror of what is recorded, and the horror and irrationality of the event itself, become intertwined and the image becomes suspect, unreadable, and, like the trauma of the event, repressed and ignored. Gaines critiques both mainstream journalism and academic film

Introduction 409 studies for succumbing to this, and avoiding a more engaged relationship with war images in ways that might create a more realistic and critical engagement with war and the politics that perpetuate it. Film scholar Nora M. Alter also addresses the problem of working with images of war in ways that might “reactivate the passive and numbing effects of war’s mediatic transformation, especially for those who only experience it at a distance through images.” In her essay “One, Two, Three Montages … Harun Farocki’s War Documentaries,” on the war documentaries of the renowned late German filmmaker Harun Farocki, she traces the ways Farocki’s approach to documentary eschews the spectacle of war violence for an analytic and pedagogical, rather than expressionistic exploration of war imagery. Uniquely, Farocki reinvents a specific documentary form for each context he is examining, not only their differing geographies and new forms of war and imaging technologies, but also new formats of distribution and exhibition, creating one of the most complex and ranging engagements with images of war. In the third essay, “The Unwar Film,” documentary film scholar Alisa Lebow looks deeply at the problem of the tradition of the war documentary as spectacle, which she argues extends and glorifies war, perpetuating militarist sympathies, if not militarism itself within the culture. Lebow critiques what she calls the “paramilitarist” war documentary “which operates within a direct sphere of ‘engagement’ with militarism, never entirely outside of its bellicose imperatives,” even when the film is making a case against the war itself. Lebow examines several experimental video works as counter-examples to the para-militarist documentary. She proposes these works as “unwar” film, which casts a sideshadow on the spectacle of war by focusing on aspects not easily describable or noticeable, but that none the less illuminate the elements of war often obscured by the spectacle of ­violence and militarism. Each of these essays highlights the relationship of emerging technologies of vision and the representation of war. All are working to make a case for a new kind of war documentary that uses technology to create a more complex and critical relation to war, to its representations, and to the technologies that produce both.

References Aufderheide, Patricia (2007) Your Country, My Country: How Films About the Iraq War Construct Publics. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 48(2), 56–65. Cox, Ana Marie (2006) The YouTube War. Time, July 19, http://content.time.com/time/ nation/article/0,8599,1216501,00.html, accessed August 2, 2014. Dyer-Witheford, N. and de Peuter, Greig (2009) Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Halter, Ed (2006) From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. Nichols, Bill (2001) Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stewart, Garrett (2009) Digital Fatigue: Imaging War in Recent American Film. Film Quarterly, 62(4), 45–55.

19

Second Thoughts on “The Production of Outrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition” Jane M. Gaines

From the outset I should say that this article resisted updating from a talk given in 2007.1 In six years, world political turbulence has meant that the sites of contention for those who make and write about documentary work have shifted so frequently that our theories are always going “out of sync.” The original article is now misaligned with the time of its present re-publication when new “outrages” claim our attention but also new screen spaces “image” more constantly, making the verb form of “image” as vital as the noun. At the time of the Yale University Iraq War documentary conference, when this talk was delivered, four years into the war, anti-war “­outrage” still felt palpable. Between 2007 and 2014, of course, events have given the US as well as the world populace many more reasons for anti-war outrage, or anti-capitalist outrage, to which add new outrage against the control society. Think here of the acceleration of the scandal of the Abu Ghraib prison photographs,2 the c­ ontinuation of the Middle Eastern war in Afghanistan, the world economic ­downturn, and, most recently, the discovery that the interminable “war on terror” has produced an infrastructure of surveillance turned on ordinary US citizens. If there is a bridge between the Yale Conference and today, it is filmmaker-journalist Laura Poitras’s anti-war trilogy, the first of which, My Country, My Country (2006), was screened there and would be followed by her highly acclaimed The Oath (2010). One recalls Poitras on a plenary panel at the August 2011 Visible Evidence Conference in New York titled “(In) Visible Evidence of War,” referencing how the Iraq-Afghanistan War had been conducted “out of sight and out of mind.” By the time of the Visible Evidence conference in Stockholm in August 2013, Poitras’s ­documentary work that began in Iraq had earned her a US Department of Homeland Security highest “threat” rating. On June 6, 2013 she shot the video interview with US security “infrastructure analyst” A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2007 Wayne State University Press. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition

411

whistleblower Edward J. Snowden in Hong Kong where he had fled after he turned over classified information detailing US mass surveillance programs to the British newspaper The Guardian (Maas, 2013).3 During and continuing through the aftermath of the Iraq War that began March 19, 2003, we were engaged in two image wars. Yet we may not have thought that there were two of them because they were inextricable. The first conflict would be the one in what is seen (and thought to be stored) in still and moving images. We spoke of this war as “out there” but “brought to us” by images of explosions, armored vehicles, and Baghdad streets, or “caught” by digital video cameras. This was the imaged conflict, a conflict an earlier academic moment understood as “images of ” war or the war seen through images. Then, 40 years ago, critical theory began to insist on moving images as representations and in the following decades stressed the standing-in function of images signifying “atrocity,” while ordinary people talked not about “images of atrocity” but about violence itself on television and in films. Now all of these approaches seem hopelessly off the mark. Why? Because of the infinitude of moving images on, around, through, under, and over the US engagement in Iraq and later Afghanistan, the infinitude accelerating the second war, the “image war” around the Iraq war that could by the end be imaged everywhere on every media outlet, everywhere and always available in all formats on multiple devices.4 To repeat: There was the war imaged and the war over the imaging of war, or the “war on images.” The Iraq conflict has been an infuriatingly stupid and wasteful war and I would like nothing more than to rage against it for the next several pages, but my topic is less the war and more the problem of the discourse around the imaging of war atrocities. The two image wars, or the inextricable conflicts that defined the Iraq war time are not both available to sight. The one war “caught” by still and moving cameras now existing in imaged form has been available everywhere to be seen; the other war, the one over the imaged war, is not exactly viewable. The other war is not on view because it is a discursive war over how we view, how we see what we see as well as what to make of the images that we see and what they make of us. Apropos of this, early in the US public reaction to the offending Abu Ghraib images, Susan Sontag (2004) said of them that the “photographs are us,” kicking off the debates as to what it was that they evidenced. As Linda Williams later demonstrated in her superb discussion of Standard Operating Procedure (2008), a critical moving image documentary about disputes over images could itself become the site of contest (Williams, 2010). The “image wars” also raise the question of the conditions of everyday engagement that made the imaged war increasingly accessible even if it wasn’t “watched” in the older sense of viewers sitting before a screen. Then again, these images may have been “glimpsed,” or not really seen at all, even if they were ever available to be accessed. So it is now about the digital delivery systems that, as they have carried these war images, are themselves undergoing something so cataclysmic that, as Patricia Zimmerman (2007) says, another conception of “media publics” is required. Suddenly, if events can be imaged on hand-held mobile devices, and moving images

412

Jane M. Gaines

“posted” to be “shared” in hopes of engaging more viewers with more images, we must start to ask what relevance the critical discourse about “the image” and “images” relative to real historical events has, if any. These are the events with which makers in the radical documentary tradition have been passionately engaged, as we will see. So in the following, after zeroing in on the 2007 “war against images,” that other war, I return to moving images and movements on the Left where the question of activist outrage historically arose, asking about 1970s Leftist film theory but also other US and European radical documentary traditions from which we seem further and further removed. At the start of the Iraq conflict, it seemed like the same old image war, the “war against images.” There was the old public distrust still held by a suspicious academic and political elite, an elite perhaps still suffering from what Martin Jay (1993) once called “iconophobia.” Yet I would put more stress on the high over low culture hierarchy here, thinking of the legacy of the high modernist conception of the image as “too given” or too lazily “over-dependent” on the world it appears to deliver.5 Somewhere in commonsense knowledge, that mélange of too easy ideas, a notion of images as “lax” as well as “excessive” and even “dangerous” meets “mindlessness” and “chaos.” Think, for instance, of the battlefield metaphor “barrage of images,” a dead giveaway that image antagonism persists in some circles. Consider how much more often we are said to be “bombarded with images” than that we are “bombarded” by or assaulted with words. Why? Words belong to a exclusive tradition of letters, literacy, and learning, still defined against the available image that so easily reaches the “letterless” populous. But is this still the case? One might think that the ubiquity of moving image devices has made image suspicion obsolete or that it only exists on one side of the generational divide.6 Because if word and image are now so interchangeably “textable” on our devices it may be that “image bashing” may be soon obsolete. Although it is likely we are in transition and living by a paradox. That is, in this technologically uneven moment, images may be both distrusted and declared harbingers of a brave new world of instantaneity and connection.7 My example of the kind of “image-bashing” indicative of the “war against images” comes from the New York Times Magazine, an ideal source for taking the temperature of an elite public antagonism toward high circulation images. In an article written some months after the April 27, 2004 broadcast of some of the Abu Ghraib photographs but before the September, 2005 release of significantly more, Michael Ignatieff (2004) took up the issue of the mass circulation of images of beheadings.8 In his misleadingly titled “The Terrorist as Auteur,” Ignatieff makes a classic paranoid case against moving images: they come to us from chaotic places – war zones and irrational psyches. He is speaking especially of the video of tortured hostages – French, Italian, Muslim, and American – circulated, as he says, as terrorist recruitment. But, as we will see, this author has great difficulty pinning down what he means by imagery. Thus in a move oblivious of its use of tautology he asserts: “In Iraq, imagery has replaced argument; indeed, atrocity footage has become its own argument” (2004: 52). If I am not mistaken, he has blamed imagery for not being rhetoric as well as for being rhetorical. Here, images out of control depict acts of war



The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition

413

that US viewers shouldn’t have to see, and, what is worse, images do this all on their own without the help of words. This familiar images-as-uncontrollable stance is buttressed by a belief in their “face value” self-evidence or with what Thomas Elsaesser once called the “dangerous naivete” of the assumption that images can and do “speak for themselves” (1998: 207). Next, the false obviousness of images that “speak for themselves” is aligned with a presumption of access so easy that it requires no learning and involves no interpretation. But more importantly, lurking in the self-evidence of images is a conviction about how images work against reason. Look again at the New York Times article: “The old questions about the war in Iraq ‘Was it legal? Was it necessary? Was it done as a last resort?’ now seem beside the point. The issue is now whether there is any way out of the vortex itself, mutually reinforcing barbarism that ends where?” (Ignatieff, 2004: 52). Here the New York Times becomes incoherent, and I must interrupt. Excuse me, I want to ask: “Is the vortex referenced here the vortex of the Iraq war or the vortex of images we receive from the front?” Since the article is ostensibly about digital video imaging and dissemination, one could assume that it is images that are sucking us into a vortex, images that make it impossible to ask hard questions about the necessity of this war. Images, images alone are able to achieve so much forgetting and are themselves responsible for undermining analysis of the very news they deliver. Wait a minute. Stop! This is blaming the medium big time and we should recognize it for what it is. It gets worse, however, and we can anticipate Ignatieff ’s next move: “This is terrorism as pornography, and it acts like pornography” (2004: 52). Terrorism is nothing but pornography? Let us consider the irresponsibility of making terrorism synonymous with pornography, with lumping all social threats together such that the scourges of society are confused by association. Pornography and terrorism become undifferentiated apples and oranges. The New York Times author makes an easy rhetorical move, but then he slips. He associates American soldier-made still images from Abu Ghraib prison with “enemy” decapitation footage without explaining the difference, displacing the blame: “The digital image – moving or still – has become an instrument of coercive interrogation” (2004: 52). Just what is it that we are supposed to be objecting to? Really, just the usual suspects of civic suspicion, which is why this odd logic can be put over: Images are the enemy’s tactic therefore images are the enemy. Then, to make things even worse, in a restatement of the most useless of all commonsense wisdom about images of atrocity, the New York Times replays the tired assessment of Vietnam, recalling the televised war that was thought to both disturb and inure viewers. It’s in the way, the writer says, terrorism “acts like” pornography, “at first making audiences feel curious and aroused, despite themselves, then ashamed, possibly degraded and finally, perhaps, just indifferent” (2004: 52). One more time we need to nail this. Let us address head on the popular paradox of the mass circulation image – the belief that something thought to be so powerfully and dangerously incendiary could, at the same time that it disturbs, not disturb us  at  all. In this disconcertingly inconsistent discourse it is never clear which is

414

Jane M. Gaines

worse – images that produce indifference or images that incite bodily actions, especially since, as it ends up, they are the same. Ignatieff ’s objection to images becoming a “weapon of war” is that Americans will become “disgusted” and that this reaction will undermine their “will to continue to fight” (2004: 58). Wait another minute. What do we finally have here? We have an anti-anti-war message smuggled into an article on the political uses of still and moving images, which amounts to a call to fight back. In 2004, the US public is encouraged to be outraged against a popular Dutch Internet site that posted images of beheadings and the groups that stage them for video cameras. But not outraged against the illegal and globally disastrous war, which, you will recall, the author has dismissed as no longer relevant. To quote him again: “The old questions about the war in Iraq ‘Was it legal? Was it necessary? Was it done as a last resort?’ now seem beside the point” (italics mine). In my first polemic against this polemic I didn’t go far enough, however. First, I didn’t raise the issue of author Michael Ignatieff ’s own support of the invasion of Iraq as well as for continued military intervention in Afghanistan.9 Second, I didn’t gesture toward what Ignatieff short-circuited, that is, what the images of beheadings he singles out cannot themselves convey about ritual decapitations as sacred practices. Reading the fuller analysis in Arjun Appadurai’s Fear of Small Numbers one is struck by the connections he draws between “global rage” against capitalist market forces and the appearance of the “sacrificial victim” along with martyred suicide bombers. Here he opens up the wider context of the enactment of ritual killing on behalf of nation, identity, and religion staged by militant Islamists, not only as a way of striking out against the United States, but as a means of pressuring India. No, the New York Times would not have been open to Appadurai’s analysis of beheading as either “political expression” or “moral response,” especially response to Abu Ghraib, which he references in the “tortured, leashed, humiliated, and photographed bodies of Muslim men in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan” (Appadurai, 2006: 12–13). Even if Ignatieff concedes that, as he puts it, “The snuff video is payback,” any Muslim “response,” whether “moral” or “political,” is negated by the reference to its packaging as the most immoral of moving image works – the mythological “snuff film” (2004: 52). Ultimately, however, the problem with the image thought to show us “too much” is that it tells us too little. As Linda Williams demonstrated in her discussion of Standard Operating Procedure, few moving image makers have attempted to question how war is visualized and one explanation for this may again be the apparent self-evidence of the especially incendiary images that, as she argues, always require larger “frames of reference” (2010: 31, 58). Yet the analytical frames that would open up the cultural and political significance of digital video of ritual beheadings uploaded to websites or sold as DVDs in Baghdad are beyond this article. In the ill-conceived war in which it was difficult for the US military to define the enemy to citizens at home, looking back, I will only claim one thing for certain. What is certain is that images were not the enemy. And here consider the consequences of this “war on images,” that is, see how easily images-as-the-enemy worked to block other points of view – the Muslim religious position, for example, so easily negated by the New York Times because the medium of its expression is entirely discountable.10



The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition

415

Where the two wars merge, where the “war against images” is literalized as an image war, I now want to change direction. For my argument is that the very ferocity of the image war hostilities that accelerated after 2004 reminds us of something that film and video makers on the Left have historically known. So let me alter course so that we may see the other side, see the implications of the “war over images” for documentary in the radical film and photography tradition. For it might appear that this old reactionary impulse, this “war against images,” has nothing to do with the goals of either the anti-war documentary or the anti-war movement to which some brave film and video makers contributed in response to the Iraq War. Then again, it might. What we see from the Left side is another, different, paradox, and that is this: the image that we need to use to “image out” (and “speak out”) against the war may be the very image that the culture is against (all the while the world watches). Here is the point: the New York Times’s overreaction to the tremendous affective investment in widely disseminated moving images of atrocity attests to an irrefutable social force. This elite tirade against images is testimony to the very power that documentary makers have historically attempted to harness. Yes, mimetic technologies do have the power to explosively re-enact, to reiterate the world before us as well as to reignite its intensities on screens as well as in the bodies and hearts of viewers.11 This expectation of explosive politicization is, in fact, the legacy of a long tradition of Leftist documentary filmmaking in Europe and North America as well as Latin America and parts of Asia.12 And thus it is that the promotional rhetoric of the new Iraq War documentaries produces an eerie ring of remembrance. Brave New Films, producers of Iraq for Sale (Robert Greenwald, US, 2006), advertises on the DVD, “share it and change the world.” So now addressing the second part of my title, I want to ask about the radical documentary legacy, a legacy that has yet to be properly situated in relation to the Vietnam anti-war documentary exemplified by such titles as The Sad Song of Yellow Skin (Mike Rubbo, Canada, 1970), the better-known Hearts and Minds (Peter Davis, US, 1974), and the French cinéma vérité classic The Anderson Platoon / La Section Anderson (Pierre Schoendoerffer, France, 1967). We may be able to agree that what these films have in common is “documentary” and “anti-war” but, in fact, at the current moment when we are thinking about emerging new digital-format works and their variably accessed and accessing publics, we can rely on neither “documentary” nor “anti-war” as airtight categories of analysis. That neither the use of cinéma vérité documentary as a style of shooting nor Iraq War soldiers as subject matter guarantees an anti-war stance was clearly demonstrated in the Yale Conference discussions around The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton, US, 2006).13 And as Zimmerman confirms, given the widening range of moving image manifestations of interest in the Iraq War, neither mainstream nor experimental as categories seem applicable either.14 So some aspects of the documentary tradition may be held over while others desperately need revision, high on the list of which is the question of the public for this work. Further thinking in this direction might follow Pat Aufderheide (2007) who has argued that irrespective of how these works are distributed, the activist agenda requires the “constitution of a public.” Her comparative work helps us to situate new

416

Jane M. Gaines

Internet publics relative to traditional organizing around local public screenings that continued at the time of the Yale Conference. The myth of “share it and change the world,” for instance, was kept alive with success stories like that surrounding the Norfolk, Virginia, YMCA screening of Sir! No Sir!: The Visual Suppressed Story of the GI Movement to End the War in Vietnam (David Zeiger, 2006), the screening that helped to ignite the Appeal for Redress action that Iraq War soldiers took as a measure of anti-war protest (Cooper, 2007). Strangely, it is this very issue of publics and social movements that has suffered from the estrangement of the documentary tradition from that Leftist film theory that descends from 1920s revolutionary Soviet filmmaking. The consequence of this earlier estrangement has been a focus less on the production of a politicized public than on the claim of the work, that is, the claim to privilege vis-à-vis the social world. Even if the documentary, mainstream, and experimental formal distinctions seem irrelevant, the Iraq War work that claims a “documentary” relation to the world still urges our attention as a hard question “called” by the US engagement in such an interminable and unjust military conflict. So the following is an attempt to reach back over a decades old divide that is no longer there except in the memory of those who lived through these years, to ask again about the Leftist abandonment of and rapprochement with so-called documentary “realism.” Our historical detour begins by digging up the connection that appears as a disconnect between the Vietnam War and 1970s film theory. To put this another way, one of the ironies of 1970s film theory is that the very theory that finally had nothing to say about early 1970s documentary war films such as Hearts and Minds, The Anderson Platoon, and Sad Song of Yellow Skin, had its origins in the French student protest against the Vietnam War. The editorials and articles in the established Cahiers du Cinéma and the newer Cinéthique, founded in 1969, grew out of the May 1968 political moment in Paris when students and workers joined together in a general strike, and for students the revolt against the authoritarian French university coincided with their criticism of the Vietnam War.15 The consequential film theory that came out of these journals was dedicated to a cinema of revolt against the French government, the film establishment, and the French Communist Party, and this theory found common cause with the anti-realism of the Soviet revolutionary film tradition and its Marxist aesthetics. For our purposes, the more or less complete break in these journals between the even earlier Leftist film theory associated with Siegfried Kracauer and especially André Bazin meant that the new theory was not equipped to deal with documentary as mode and was possibly even hostile to it. However, the important critique of bourgeois cinematic realism initiated by Cahiers du Cinéma never exactly dismissed all films in what Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, in an October 1969 editorial still respectful of Bazin, called the “live cinema” tradition, and in their category (g) they express interest in an approach to filmmaking in which the active role given to the “concrete stuff of the film” can actually challenge the process of the depiction.16 In other words, the Brechtian foregrounding of the conventions and materials of cinema was in this seminal essay considered part of at least one branch of a documentary tradition. So it would seem



The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition

417

somewhat of a mystery as to why documentary, and political documentary in particular, would later become the antithesis of the new theoretical project that Cahiers initiated (see also Rosen, 2008). There is yet another connection between the Vietnam War and 1970s film theory, a connection less oblique but perhaps just as overlooked. For the history and theory of documentary that we would have expected between 1972 and 1990 was interrupted not only by the theory that had such high formal expectations for radical film but by a film against the war, Letter to Jane (Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, France, 1972).17 And it is Letter to Jane, with its critique of US imperialism and of Hollywood star Jane Fonda, that reveals the strange relation between film theory and the Vietnam anti-war film. This is a question of the legacy of French and AngloAmerican film theory as well as that of the intellectual Left where the fate of documentary film history and theory hung in the balance. Because between the mid-1970s, just as the Vietnam war ended, between the war’s end and until the 1990s, in the struggle over and with moving images, academic, Leftist, AngloAmerican film theory, with a few crucial exceptions, was “missing in action.”18 And here is where the fate of documentary film theory is tied to the work of Godard and Gorin, exemplified so strangely by this odd film that comes out of their Dziga Vertov period in which they paid homage to the most radical of the Soviets (later called a “father of documentary”) in the name they took for themselves. Letter to Jane, we now realize, was the lone anti-Vietnam War film to test the political modernism that fits post-1968 film theory hand in glove.19 Yet Letter to Jane employs a strategy unlike that of the other Dziga Vertov Group work in that its antagonism to continuity style is expressed by devoting a large percentage of its image track to the L’Express photograph of “Hanoi Jane” looking inquisitively at the Vietnamese.20 On the sound track the famous Godardian voice-over asks the image: “How can cinema help the Vietnamese people with their independence?,” “What part should intellectuals play in the revolution?,” and quoting Chairman Mao, “Where do right ideas come from?” One could argue that Letter to Jane is more minimalist and therefore less aesthetically challenging than some of the other Dziga Vertov Group films, yet one could also say that it is deceptively simple as a basic lesson in the deconstructive approach to the image. In interrogating the L’Express photograph for “covering up the imperialism that it reveals,” Letter to Jane was to have demonstrated that the relation of the photographic to the event was not exactly one of pure capture.21 Here, however, confronting what would become the theoretical impasse which disallowed realist relations and dismissed empirical spectators, we also are reminded that Letter to Jane had no activist anti-war credentials.22 In retrospect, the Dziga Vertov films fulfill the role of vanguard ideal rather than filmmaking model, inspiring the impossible-to-sustain prohibition against cinematic realism while proscribing the difficult “radical form/radical content” aesthetic of the Marxist-Leninist Godardian-Brechtian moment.23 It may now appear that the prohibition against “capturing the world with the camera,” against any recording that failed to critique the photographic image, thwarted the development of documentary film theory.24 The longer version of this story reviews the Althusserian

418

Jane M. Gaines

skepticism of philosophical empiricism and revisits the translation of Brechtian distanciation and Derridean deconstruction into a style of moving image production.25 To be clear, we are speaking not so much of political as of theoretical prohibitions, taboos that came to be understood as the important “critique of realism,” a critique which held that as a style and as a sign of access, aesthetic realism was hopelessly predisposed not to change but to maintain the world as it was so easily “seen to be.” In feminist theory, where this position was taken up so ardently, the camera was thought too complicit an instrument to “capture” the reality of women’s struggles, a reality which could neither be recorded nor discovered. Claire Johnston’s article (1976) on the political modernism of the feminist documentary The Nightcleaners (Berwick Street Collective, UK, 1975) struck out against the assumption that political cinema must “produce the effect of realism, to show things as they really are.” Thus it was that academic feminist film theory and radical documentary in the tradition of labor struggle films like Union Maids (Julia Reichert, Jim Klein, and Miles Mogulescu, US, 1976) developed in different directions.26 Union Maids, however, is the stylistic mother of many of the new Iraq documentaries, a precursor the Left can now claim.27 So what was done to heal the theoretical breach between Leftist activism and 1970s Marxist aesthetics? Now, historically on the other side of “the critique of realism” and even after the corrective that I call the “critique of the critique of realism,” few will recall a breach.28 And thus it is a strange twist indeed that since 2003 we have been engaged in another war whose parallels with the one over 40 years ago are all too painfully apparent, because it has been in later moments of political crisis that the proscriptive antirealism of political modernism has proven unsustainable, a theoretical luxury at a moment when we needed to image: “actually, the situation is not this but that.” For what could be said is that political movements cry out for images that evidence their moment. Thus we should see documentaries like Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1990) as well as the AIDS activism videotapes that Alex Juhasz studied in 1995 as a turning point, an opening for the rapprochement.29 For the politics of being African American, gay, and HIV positive trumped the radical form/radical content politics of style. But most relevant, we might recall that it was two later anti-war experimental documentaries that coincided with the abandonment of political modernism or “politically correct style” – Harun Farocki’s Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges / Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989)30 and Bill Nichols’s 1991 Paper Tiger TV spoof of Dan Rather’s coverage of the first Gulf War. Less well known outside Germany is Harun Farocki’s Etwas wird sichtbar / Before Your Eyes – Vietnam (1982), which Thomas Elsaesser uses as an example of a film that “disentangles itself from the 1970s counter-strategies of struggle and resistance,” that is, as it finds ways out of political modernism (2004a: see also 2004b). So we reach back over the long, theoretically fallow (for documentary theory) period after the Vietnam War, reach back not to one but to two, three, and maybe more traditions. Thus we reach back to try to connect the Iraq War documentaries with the Soviets in the 1920s, with Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, where the idea of cinema as politically endowed is developed and tested, to the Europeans in



The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition

419

the 1930s who used documentary to protest peoples’ struggles as in Misère au Borinage (Joris Ivens and Henri Storck, Belgium, 1933). We reach back to the United States where, beginning in the 1930s, the Film and Photo League produced labor documentaries like Native Land (Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand, 1937–1941) and to New York Newsreel’s portrait of the student anti-war movement, Columbia Revolt (1968).31 But let us be clear that this reaching back to times before the 1970s “critique of realism” is neither undertaken to bring back a pure non-modernist documentary nor to restore the much-maligned aesthetic realism to theoretical respectability.32 We look for what we can use toward a theory of documentary activism. Consider then what else we find before the 1970s Marxist-Leninist theory associated with Cahiers du Cinéma in France and Screen in the United Kingdom, and after the expiration of that theory in the late 1980s. Before we find canonical film theory, beginning in the 1920s if not before, also aligned with the Left, but which, with the exception of Latin America, has seldom concentrated on the question of the Left-leaning documentary and never devoted much attention to the war documentary, which, since Vietnam, emerges as the anti-war documentary. This, then, would be that moment, right? Because some of the earliest film theorists anticipated the political needs of a historical moment such as this. For the German film critic Kracauer and the French Bazin, for instance, theirs was a theory for an aesthetic of affinity between cinema and something they referred to as “the real” but by which they meant something more.33 Here we find a perennial philosophical problem (What, after all, is real?), but also a dilemma with immediate implications for political activism. Within the once-discredited theory of cinematic realism associated with these two theorists can be found a premise that every moving image activist takes as a watchword. Within this theory that the 1970s thought was too innocent about the way images work, there is another theory, a theory of what could be called same world sensation, that is, a concrete continuity between ourselves and the world on the screen, a continuity that is felt as seen, and as seen as it is felt. Like any theory of social activism, this theory assumes that the world that demands our action is the world in which we can act or in which we can intervene to reverse intolerable conditions. Bazin, writing in the 1950s, refers to a historicalmaterial “continuum”: “The reality that the cinema reproduces at will and organizes is the same worldly reality of which we are a part, the sensible continuum out of which the celluloid makes a mold both spatial and temporal” (Bazin, 2002: 30). Emphasizing the sensate continuum over the mold here, the figuration of the continuum works as a means of placing viewers, implicating them, and demanding their outrage against injustice. The documentary film that looks so much like the world before the camera is not exactly the same as (for who would think that), but has been produced out of, cut out of, the same material conditions that exist at the moment in which we object to those conditions, whether conditions of military escalation, suffering populations, or corrupt leadership. Because if we coexist with the conditions depicted, every screening of these documentary moving image works assumes this principle: what we see on screen is actually happening or has happened in our world.34

420

Jane M. Gaines

Those familiar with canonical film theory may connect Bazin’s “mold” with the photographic indexical sign, the sign defined by its privileged relation to the world and thought to exist in a causal relation to the cataclysmic event before the motion photographic camera. That is, the event causes or makes its mark on the light-sensitive emulsion “exposed” in the camera. Think of the boon to the documentary maker of the historical “proof equals truth” component that underwrites the rhetoric of “this is really happening.” Without a doubt, the history of radical film practice is premised on the delivery of evidence from the front, whether labor struggle, protest march, or human disaster. Some will rightly argue that digital imaging invalidates this evidentiary claim. Of course the digital image that doesn’t need the real historical world for its mimesis cancels the apparent privilege of the photographic and hence the so-called “crisis” of the index.35 Or, no more indexical privilege. So however enthusiastically we might have once jumped on the bandwagon of indexical crisis we should probably now get off. Digital recording as well as digital image manipulation can produce political augmentation as easily as it can achieve reactionary falsification therefore we must rethink indexical privilege given the output of so many makers who have ingeniously augmented photographic or computergenerated images, strategically fabricating historical material in works that channel our outrage. Exceptions to outdated realist purism abound in the crop of Iraq War political work and one thinks here also of the “recreations” in Road to Guantanamo (Michael Winterbottom, UK, 2006) as well as the availability of the term documentary fiction. If there is a refrain here it is that documentary moving images are powerful because of the real historical world – the world is the source of their incendiary power. Yes, the image can be more incendiary than the word, but the situation is not, however, as the New York Times magazine readers are told – that we should disparage the image on the analogy with the terrorist. Put more productively, documentary film, video, photography, and now digital works in the radical tradition have a function that we do not attribute to other creative works – they use the world to transform the world. Or, documentary seeks to “manipulate reality by means of its image,” an image which, in the anthropological talismanic sense, derives its power from something else, here the very world that the image appears to have replicated so perfectly.36 To use this to separate out documentary works, let’s say that they attempt to keep up with the moving target that is the teeming world condition because it is that world which makes the work. On this point, Jean-Luc Comolli, long after his 1969 Cahiers du Cinéma manifesto, is especially eloquent when he says of documentary that it “draws its power from its very difficulty, wholly derived from the fact that the real doesn’t give film the time to forget it, that the world presses on, that it is through contact with the world that cinema is made” (1999: 40). Since Leftist academics have not agreed on the definition of documentary, they might also hesitate to define a radical tradition, although many might concur about the expectations that they have of such work, overlapping here with documentary makers who see contemporary social reality as thoroughly contradictory. There is no better example of this than the diverse media works positioned against the Iraq War.



The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition

421

For instance, commenting on My Country, My Country (2006), Laura Poitras has described her political goal in taking a videotape camera to Baghdad as exposure of the two-faced US stance. As she put it, she wanted to expose “the contradiction between what we said we were doing and what we were doing.”37 As we take further the caveat that it is the world-historical event that endows the documentary image, we open up the relation to the event not as a resolution of opposing positions but as a grasp of the contradictory. This is meant in all senses, those with which we comprehend as well as those in which we have in our analytical sights the global imperial expansionist fanatical forces that have clashed with local forces, ancient and equally fanatical, some fighting on behalf of the same abstract idea that the other side is ostensibly fighting for. What we see in the best Iraq War documentary is the contradiction not recorded but used in such a way as to say: “Think and look at what it means to ‘liberate’ the Iraqi people and to produce not liberation but its opposite, further and deeper oppression.” Of all the political arts, moving image documentary is best positioned to stalk the contradiction. One thinks of the follow focus and hand-held techniques of cinéma vérité, but we would go beyond to ask for a more immediately analytical camera. Documentary makers are positioned in such a way that with their attention to everyday life they see things coming unraveled, finding, for instance, the myth that occupiers are “liberators” exposed in the most ordinary moment. Thus an important caveat: It is not exactly that documentary makers alone “work” the contradiction, because the situation itself can be expected to eventually show up its own structural inconsistencies. The probe of the contradiction then may even be performed by ordinary people like the mother of dead mercenary Jerry Zorko who in Iraq for Sale (Robert Greenwald and Kerry Candaele, 2006), accuses the munitions industries of “getting away with murder,” she herself delivering the spontaneous analysis of “our loved ones as opposed to profit.”38 We further grasp from Iraq for Sale the contradiction between war and profit seen in the way the KVR corporation feeds troops to keep them alive while endangering their lives with their cost-cutting measures. I want to confess that I set out to write this without recourse to the concept that has defined not only documentary but cinema as an image force. I tried to keep from using the term “reality.” Since “reality” kept slipping in, I suggest we might just replace it with “actuality,” signaling a continuity with the actualités that in film history prefigure documentary.39 But a more important usage is that of Bertolt Brecht for whom “actually,” the adverb, is a defamiliarization device. There in his theory of the critique of the everyday by the everyday itself, is the way in which things “come down,” revealing themselves as they unravel. Here theorized is the documentary capacity to “image” the surge in such a way that it is seen as the home grown terror and torture that it is. Against the familiar clean-cut boy soldier image, this documentary work images back: “Actually,” it is not that way, it is this” (Brecht, 1964: 145). And here is where the war’s going so far beyond, so far exceeding its representation that it is un-image-inable, tells us what produces the “war against images,” evidenced most pointedly in the New York Times outburst. Certainly the analogy between images and terrorism tells us that this is a question of “image knowledge.” That is,

422

Jane M. Gaines

moving images that confirm what we already know are not the suspect image, not “too much image,” however, that which we cannot fathom and thus reject  – ­pornography, entertainment, and even television news is “too much image.” When world-shattering knowledge appears to us in moving image form it may be received as “too much” to take, thus the moving image is disparaged when it delivers what we do not want to know – things unpredictable and incomprehensible. But above and beyond new knowledge, it is significantly the massive scale – what is shared with modern warfare – that in “the image” now terrifies some people. The terror is in general innumerability and immensity, become the cataclysmic and explosive, and that massiveness is everywhere available to almost everyone in the world with astonishing instantaneity. So it would seem that this massiveness is not of the same order as the mass culture which defined the cinema century and its new publics, for we are now speaking of Internet and cell-phone imaging in terms of colossal global proportions. But the global is contradictorily quotidian, troubling and threatening when it is brought too close to home. Because what is feared is not the digital image per se but the new massiveness plus an old holdover – the mimetic, or the “body see, body do” potentiality of the moving image. As makers, however, let us not be out-massed. Neither let us as activists forget what I have called elsewhere the mobilizing potential of “political mimesis” (Gaines, 1999: 95). The point I would finally make about the 2004 New York Times rant against images is that it tips us off that we have been on to something. Thus, after so many decades of radical aspiration, of investment in that legacy of documentary, the goal is still to transform events through images but also to turn the powerful outrage against images into outrage against US foreign policy in the Middle East, as Charles Musser (2007) has so eloquently argued. As I am urging, it is our challenge as activist makers and critics to command the massive as well as the mimetic for a politics of global proportions, for everyone mobilized against this war and all others mounted in the name of the global imperial imperative. In conclusion, I want to return to the same world sensation introduced earlier, adding to it what I recommend as radical documentary seen as another body genre (Williams, 1991: 4). By body genre I mean the commonalities of works that make us want to physically do something, ideally, to want to act out or speak out because of conditions in the world of the audience. And this is where the newest of media and the theories that rise to it make the case for more not less body. The new media theory revival of Henri Bergson, for example, has effected the re-placement of the body to a “center of action” and even as “destined to move other objects” (1991: 20). Is it not possible to insist on bodies as actioning in the world of images and the world that is imaged, the universe as “aggregate of images,” and thus image-making as world action of the first and most basic order (1991: 18)? In multiple realms, then, following Bergson, we “posit that system of closely-linked images which we call the material world, and imagine here and there, within the system, centers of real action, represented by living matter” (1991: 31). So the body “enworlded,” as Vivian Sobchack (1992: 59) would say, is the body susceptible to movement and able to move, to action the image that actions its audience as another body. And to this end, Eisenstein  contributes the last ingredient, the trembling aspect that reaches the



The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition

423

psyche, rescued from apolitical emotionality and promoted to a veritable engine of change. What from Eisenstein might be there for documentary, that would rail and cry out against the injustice that is the Iraq War, would be the “pathos of fact.”40 This is perhaps what is achieved with Baghdad ER (Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill, US, 2006) – the production of strangely, sadly furious audiences. So when I refer to the “production” of outrage, I am returning full circle to the Soviet tradition in which revolutionary bodies were to have been “produced” by the cinema machine. It still takes bodies.

Conclusion: Second Thoughts In 2007, I got it wrong. After a rousingly political academic conference, I linked a group of new documentary works to a legacy, a typical move in which the authority of history is called upon to help claim intellectual viability for an immediate venture. There is, however, no link between Iraq anti-war documentaries and 1920s Soviet revolutionary avant-gardism, that is no link other than the one that we make. More problematic, by beginning with the “rant” of what now seems an outmoded elite journalism I may have given the impression that this reactionary position defined the early years of the Iraq War. What was needed then was what we still need – analysis of competing “truth claims” relative to a range of outlets as well as target groups. Readers belonging to another moment will see the incendiary digital video footage of beheadings and the thousands of site hits thought scandalous in 2004 against the millions of postings of the June 6, 2009 image of young female protester Neda Agha Soltan shot by Iranian security during the demonstrations around the presidential election there. Then think how many times have we been told that the cell-phone image of Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit-seller who set himself on fire in 2011, started the “Social Media Arab Spring,” then told in 2012 that the incendiary video  Innocence of Muslims, the insult to Mohammad posted by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, was to blame for the attack on the US embassy in Libya.41 Some might see crediting then blaming images as echoing the incoherence of “The Terrorist as Auteur.” But it isn’t exactly images that are now vilified as much as it is some media “sharers” – tweeters especially – although so much shallow journalism can’t decide whether the role of the state has been usurped or that “the people have spoken.” How, within one year, can social media be credited with the so-called “Arab Spring revolution” and blamed for the attack on the US embassy in Tripoli? These threads pulled from the current media discourse on activism, terrorism, and social media only prove how difficult it is to find analysis of social media on high-circulation online news sites. Missing from mainstream media coverage for a decade has been consistent coverage of two forces – the efforts of established activist groups like Peace Action and the opposition of veterans and their families.42 It may be that we need to figure family war fatigue as well as organized peace efforts into the failure of the US government to rally public support for military intervention in Syria in the fall of 2013. There will of course be the technological utopianism from within our own

424

Jane M. Gaines

field, as in Nanna Verhoeff ’s theorization of the mobile navigational apparatus as a “full-bodied experience” (2012: 166). Yes, I would still say that it “takes bodies” but I didn’t mean that without organized movements bodies would be enough.

Notes 1 “The Production of Outrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition,” published in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 48(2), 36–55. © 2007 Wayne State University Press. The current chapter revises and updates this article with the permission of Wayne State University Press. 2 Abuse of Iraqi POWs by GIs Probed, CBS News, April 27, 2004, http://www.cbsnews. com/news/abuse-of-iraqi-pows-by-gis-probed/, accessed August 2, 2014; Seymour M. Hersh, Annals of National Security: Torture at Abu Ghraib, The New Yorker, May 10, 2004. For further details see Hersh (2004). 3 For overview and analysis see Lanier (2013). 4 André Gaudreault, Columbia University Seminar, Sites of Cinema, December 2011, referred to the ATAWD, the “anytime, anywhere device.” 5 See Armstrong (1999) for a useful discussion of the attitude of literary and artistic modernism toward the pictorial image. 6 See Turkle (2011) for the parental point of view on the relation of people to their digital devices, notable for making no distinction between word and image. 7 Moving images are not so suspect when they are understood as information technology, exemplified by those academic humanities programs that, while still reluctant to take film and photographic studies seriously, embrace IT studies. The point of view of one literary scholar writing about moving image culture is revealing. Rey Chow, commenting upon gender images, has said that “the morally impassioned rebuke of images always goes hand in hand with the massive production and circulation of more images” (2007: 11). To restate this to emphasize either the futility or the irony: the popular moving image culture that occasions “moral rebuke” is accompanied by the massiveness of the very circulation that inspired the rebuke. 8 See n. 2 on the April 27, 2004 broadcast. After writing this article, Ignatieff was elected to the Canadian House of Commons in 2006 and served as the Canadian Liberal Party Leader 2008–2011. Before that he had a career as a journalist and broadcaster, but began as an academic at the University of British Columbia, later at University of Toronto, and as of 2013 at the Kennedy Center at Harvard University. 9 See, e.g., his Wikipedia entry for further details. 10 The images-as-the-enemy mindset has further ramifications in the war zone of public opinion best exemplified by US media hostility towards the Arab news network, Al Jazeera, which continues to this day. As we recall, soon after the images-as-the-enemy position turned Al Jazeera into an Iraq War US military target, hostility toward some images turned into attempts to close the station down by bombing Al Jazeera reporters. Significantly, images of an endangered Al Jazeera journalist reporting from a Baghdad rooftop just before his death, effectively produced images of the “war on images” as a war on journalists themselves as part of the analysis of one of the earliest Iraq War documentaries, Control Room (Jehane Noujaim, US, 2004).



The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition

425

11 Elizabeth Cowie (2011: 21) offers as part of a new definition of documentary, the idea that the reality that is recorded is “re-presented as a reenactment of the past.” 12 On the US Leftist tradition of Newsreel, Nikino, and Frontier Films, see Russell Campbell (1982). On the Latin American tradition, see Julianne Burton (1984). For the European tradition, see Thomas Waugh, Joris Ivens: Essays on the Career of a Radical Documentarist, forthcoming. On the Japanese tradition, see Abé Mark Nornes (2003). 13 Just as there is such a range of Iraq War video footage posted on YouTube that can’t necessarily be seen as “anti-war,” like Battle of Fallujah (2004) listed as having 20,508 views that runs a banner “Should Obama Be Impeached Now?” (accessed November 22, 2013). Tony Grajeda quotes Anthony Swofford’s 2003 book Jarhead in which the author describes how “anti-war” films Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket provided “pro-war” stimulation for US soldiers, see Jump Cut, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/ jc49.2007/Grajeda/, accessed August 3, 2014. 14 See Zimmerman (2007: 69–70). Her argument is that these categories are outmoded because of the “turbulent new media ecology.” See, e.g., www.persuasivegames.com/ games and www.dictionaryofwar.org. 15 See Sylvia Harvey (1978: 3–13, on the political events, 33–43 on film journals). 16 Comolli and Narboni in Nichols (1976: 27–28). But much more work needs to be done on the question of the Cahiers editorial’s stance on documentary, especially since “live cinema” in (g) is compared with “live cinema” in (f), the larger category in which “live cinema” is more directly associated with the cinéma direct that one assumes references the American direct cinema tradition. For an explanation as to why direct cinema has been politically suspect, see Brian Winston (1995). 17 See Colin MacCabe (1980: 66) for a discussion of Letter to Jane as having a complicated relation to the Dziga Vertov Group’s work, which he says, has to do with its location between the commercial (capitalist) cinema audience and the more political audience for which they imagined the Dziga Vertov films. More current analyses include Jonathan Dawson, who writes that one way to see the film is as “a very long lecture (or harangue) by two filmmakers,” that might be “the purest example of agitprop in cinematic history”: http://sensesofcinema.com/2006/cteq/letter_to_jane/, accessed August 3, 2014. 18 Notable here is the work that respected both the documentary tradition and the Cahiers revolutionary tradition, the tradition known as 1970s Screen theory, see key articles in Waugh (1984) and articles published in Jump Cut beginning in 1974, throughout the lean years for documentary theory, e.g., articles and interviews in Steven (1985) by Russell Campbell, John Hess, Linda Gordon, Sherry Millner, Clyde Taylor, Tom Waugh, Chuck Kleinhans, Julianne Burton, and Julia Lesage. Examples of more recent t­ heo­retical work on documentary published in Jump Cut are Michael Chanan, “The Documentary Chronotope” (43, July 2000) and Jean-Luc Lioult, “Framing the Unexpected” (47, Winter 2005). See www.ejumpcut.org/archive/. 19 Harvey (1982: 51) identifies what she sees as the “mistake” of the “antirealist theorists of the 1970s.” Like George Lukács before them, she says, they were over-invested in the idea that form could be radical in and of itself, and failed to theorize either historically situated viewers or the reception context. Harvey’s term “political modernism,” going beyond the 1970s term “counter-cinema,” is useful as it defines the double aspiration of the theory aligned with cinema practice in this influential period. For the fullest discussion, see David Rodowick (1994: ch. 1). Other films from the Dziga Vertov period

426

20

21

22

23 24 25

26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Jane M. Gaines were Vent d’est, Struggle in Italy, British Sounds, Pravda, Vladimir and Rosa, and Tout va bien. One of the best examples of how theory developed in line with these films is Peter Wollen (1972). On January 27, 2007 Jane Fonda appeared at an anti-war rally in Washington, DC, ­resurrecting the connection between Iraq and Vietnam, but also the criticism of the Hollywood star, this time based on the fear that her star power would sidetrack the event. More work needs to be done on the history of the relation between deconstruction and 1970s film theory, particularly as it was adapted to avant-garde practice by writers for Tel Quel such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Philippe Sollers. A good starting place is Rodowick (1994: 20–21), particularly where he discusses the rewriting of the excluded and the challenge to critical reading posed by contradiction in the text. Chuck Kleinhans, co-editor of Jump Cut, maintains that Jane Fonda was an activist then and that her effort on behalf of the GI Coffeehouse “seems to be a whole lot more than Gorin and Godard (Far from Vietnam, indeed!) ever did to try to stop the war.” Email communication, June 24, 2008. See Bertolt Brecht (1974); Colin MacCabe (1974), Stephen Heath (1975–1976). Evidence that the Brechtian tradition stayed alive longer than one might have thought is Jill Godmilow (2002). Bill Nichols (1991) has argued that at the time he published his book, documentary film theory had been effectively moribund since the 1960s. For an overview of what was taken from French philosopher Louis Althusser, see Peter Dews (1994). The attempt to define a Derridean screen practice goes back to Jean-Louis Baudry (1974), but needs reconsideration since the term “deconstruction” has come to denote such a wide range of interventions, both critical and artistic. See Noel King (1981) for the challenge to documentary realism. The “realist debate” in feminist film theory is summarized in E. Ann Kaplan (1983: 125–141). Most comprehensive is Janet Walker and Diane Waldman (1999: Introduction). For instance, Why We Fight (Eugene Jarecki, US, 2006), My Country, My Country (Laura Poitras, US, 2006), Gunner Palace (Michael Tucker, US, 2005), Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War (Robert Greenwald, US, 2004), Baghdad ER (Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill, US, 2006), Iraq for Sale (Robert Greenwald and Kerry Candaele, US, 2006), Shocking and Awful (Deep Dish TV, 2005), and Sir! No Sir! (David Zeiger, US, 2005). Examples of the later “critique of the critique of realism” include Ivone Margulies (2002) and Stella Bruzzi (2000). See Jane M. Gaines (2007). Alex Juhasz (1995), also Juhasz (1991). Add to this list The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1984), the significance of which is detailed in B. Ruby Rich (2013: 237–246). The film came to critical attention in the United States via Harun Farocki (1993) and Kaja Silverman (1992). See also Nora Alter (2004). See Michael Renov (2004: ch. 1) on New York Newsreel, and Bill Nichols (1980). Bill Nichols (2001) makes the point that there is no necessary contradiction between modernism and documentary in his important revision of documentary film history that gives particular emphasis to Europe in the 1920s. The best discussion of this is Philip Rosen (2001). Cowie (2011: 25) is useful here in settling the question of fiction as opposed to nonfiction as not to be found in the work but in the “authorization” of it by makers,



35

36 37 38

39 40 41

42

The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition

427

exhibitors, broadcasters. Here is where one would also need to refine a theory of activist work strategically designed for its moment. See also Carl Plantinga (1997: 24–25) who refers to “mobilizing” audience expectations as part of his seminal definition of nonfiction work as defined by reception context. For the notion of the indexical sign see Charles Sanders Peirce (1955). While Nichols (1991) gave indexicality renewed force within documentary film theory, later Rosen laid out the problem of the political concern about the non-indexical status of the computergenerated or digital image where the privileged relation to the historical object or event is lost (see Rosen, 2001: ch. 8). More recently, Mary Ann Doane, introducing an edited issue of Differences 18(1) (2007), 5, refers to a “rhetoric of crisis.” See Jane M. Gaines (1999: 94), drawing on Michael Taussig (1993: 57). Conference on “War, Documentary and Iraq,” Yale University, February 1–4, 2007. Radical media maker Danny Schechter in the Yale Conference discussion expressed concern that cinéma vérité could produce an effect opposite to what the makers intended, suggesting that the work could “reinforce a policy you might not approve of ” if subjects are left to speak uncoached, since situations in this tradition are by convention uncontrolled. From scene to scene this might be the case, but I am attempting to take a longer view based on everyday life theory developed by Bertolt Brecht and Henri Lefebvre. See Ben Highmore (2002). For an account of the actualité as precursor to documentary, see Tom Gunning (1994). For an elaboration of Eisenstein’s theory of pathos see Jacques Aumont (1987). Typical sources on this phenomenon are Andrew Lam, From Arab Spring to Autumn Rage: The Dark Power of Social Media, The Huffington Post, September 14, 2012; Mark Pfeifle, Changing the Face(book) of Social Activism, The Huffington Post, August 14, 2012. Longer form journalism may be just somewhat less of a cheerleader. See Malcolm Gladwell, Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, The New Yorker, October 4, 2010; Nathan Schneider, Breaking Up with Occupy, The Nation, September 30, 2013, 12–18. For the idea that US citizens are tired of war and the role of Peace Action see editorial, Democracy vs. War, The Nation, September 23, 2013, 4.

References Alter, Nora (2004) The Political Im/perceptible: Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War. In Elsaesser, Thomas (ed.) Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines, pp. 211–234. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Appadurai, Arjun (2006) Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Armstrong, Nancy (1999) Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Aufderheide, Patricia (2007) Your Country, My Country: How Films on Iraq Construct Publics. Framework, 48(2), 56–65. Aumont, Jacques (1987) Montage Eisenstein, trans. Lee Hildreth, Constance Penley, and Andrew Ross. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Baudry, Jean-Louis (1974) Writing, Fiction, Ideology, trans. Diana Matias. Afterimage, 5, 22–39.

428

Jane M. Gaines

Bazin, André (2002) Death Every Afternoon, trans. Mark A. Cohen. In Margulies, Ivone (ed.) Rites of Realism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bergson, Henri (1991) Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books. Brecht, Bertolt (1964) Brecht on Theatre. New York: Hill and Wang. Brecht, Bertolt (1974) A Small Contribution to the Theme of Realism. Screen, 15(2), 45–48. Bruzzi, Stella (2000) New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. Burton, Julianne (1984) Democratizing Documentary: Modes of Address in the Latin American Cinema, 1958–72. In Waugh, Thomas (ed.) “Show Us Life”: Toward a History and Aesthetics of Committed Documentary. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Campbell, Russell (1982) Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States, 1930–42. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. Chow, Rey (2007) Sentimental Fabulations: Contemporary Chinese Films. New York: Columbia University Press. Comolli, Jean-Luc (1999) Documentary Journey to the Land of the Head Shrinkers, trans. Annette Michelson. October, 90, 36–49. Cooper, Marc (2007) About Face: The Growing Anti-War Movement in the Military. The Nation, 8 January, 13. Cowie, Elizabeth (2011) Recording Reality, Desiring the Real. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dews, Peter (1994) Althusser, Structuralism, and the French Epistemological Tradition. In Elliot, Gregory (ed.) Althusser: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Doane, Mary Ann (2007) Indexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction Differences, 18(1), 1–6. Elsaesser, Thomas (1998) Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time. In Elsaesser, Thomas and Hoffman, Kay (eds.) Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Elsaesser, Thomas (2004a) Political Filmmaking After Brecht: Harun Farocki, for Example. In Elsaesser (ed.) Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines, pp. 133–153. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Elsaesser, Thomas (2004b) Working at the Margins: Film as a Form of Intelligence. In Elsaesser (ed.) Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines, pp. 101–106. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Farocki, Harun (1993) Commentary on Images of the World and the Inscription of War. Discourse, 15, 78–92. Gaines, Jane M. (1999) Political Mimesis. In Gaines, Jane M. and Renov, Michael (eds.) Collecting Visible Evidence, pp. 84–102. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gaines, Jane M. (2007) Documentary Radicality. Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 16(1), 5–24. Godmilow, Jill (2002) Kill the Documentary as We Know It. Journal of Film and Video, 54, 3–10. Gunning, Tom (1994) Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the “View” Aesthetic. In Hertogs, Daan and de Klerk, Nico (eds.) Nonfiction from the Teens, pp. 9–24. Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum. Harvey, Sylvia (1978) May ’68 and Film Culture. London: British Film Institute. Harvey, Sylvia (1982) Whose Brecht? Memories for the Eighties: A Critical Recovery. Screen, 23(1), 45–59. Heath, Stephen (1975–1976) From Brecht to Film: Theses, Problems. Screen, 16(4), 34–35.



The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition

429

Hersh, Seymour (2004) Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. New York: Harper Collins. Highmore, Ben (2002) Introduction: Questioning Everyday Life. In Highmore (ed.) The Everyday Life Reader. London: Routledge. Ignatieff, Michael (2004) The Terrorist as Auteur. New York Times Magazine, November 14, 50–52, 58. Jay, Martin (1993) Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Modern French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Johnston, Claire (1976) The Nightcleaners (Part One): Rethinking Political Cinema. Jump Cut, 12/13, 55–56. Juhasz, Alex (1991) They Said We Were Trying to Show Reality – All I Want to Show Is My Video: The Politics of Realist Feminist Documentary. In Gaines, Jane M. and Renov, Michael (eds.) Collecting Visible Evidence, pp. 190–215. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Juhasz, Alex (1995) AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kaplan, E. Ann (1983) Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New York: Methuen. King, Noel (1981) Recent “Political” Documentary: Notes on Union Maids and Harlan County, USA. Screen, 22(2), 7–18. Lanier, Jaron (2013) The Meta Question: What Is the National Security Agency Doing with your Metadata. The Nation, July, 20–26. Maas, Peter (2013) How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets. New York Times Magazine, August 13, 1–17. MacCabe, Colin (1974) Realism and Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses. Screen, 15(2), 7–27. MacCabe, Colin (1980) Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Margulies, Ivone (ed.) (2002) Rites of Realism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Musser, Charles (2007) War, Documentary and Iraq Dossier: Film Truth in the Age of George W. Bush. Framework, 48(2), 9–35. Nichols, Bill (ed.) (1976) Movies and Methods, vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nichols, Bill (1980) Newsreel: Documentary Filmmaking on the American Left. New York: Arno Press. Nichols, Bill (1991) Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nichols, Bill (2000) Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde. Critical Inquiry, 27, 580–610. Nornes, Abé Mark (2003) Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era Through Hiroshima. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders (1955) Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler. New York: Dover Publications. Plantinga, Carl (1997) Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Renov, Michael (2004) The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rich, B. Ruby (2013) New Queer Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rodowick, David (1994) The Crisis of Political Modernism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

430

Jane M. Gaines

Rosen, Philip (2001) Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rosen, Philip (2008) Screen and 1970s Film Theory. In Grieveson, Lee and Wasson, Haidee (eds.) Inventing Film Studies, pp. 270–274. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Silverman, Kaja (1992) What Is a Camera? Or: History in the Field of Vision. Discourse, 15, 3–56. Sobchack, Vivian (1992) The Address of the Eye. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sontag, Susan (2004) Regarding the Torture of Others. New York Times Magazine, May 23, 29. Steven, Peter (ed.) (1985) Jump Cut: Hollywood, Politics, and Counter-Cinema. New York: Praeger Books. Taussig, Michael (1993) Mimesis and Alterity. New York: Routledge. Turkle, Sherry (2011) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books. Verhoeff, Nanna (2012) Mobile Screens: The Visual Regime of Navigation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Walker, Janet and Waldman, Diane (eds.) (1999) Feminism and Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Waugh, Thomas (ed.) (1984) “Show Us Life”: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Williams, Linda (1991) Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess. Film Quarterly, 44(4), 2–13. Williams, Linda (2010) Cluster Fuck: The Forcible Frame in Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure. Camera Obscura, 25(1), 29–67. Winston, Brian (1995) Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute. Wollen, Peter (1972) Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’Est. Afterimage, 4, 6–16. Zimmerman, Patricia R. (2007) Public Domains: Engaging Iraq Through Experimental Digitalities. Framework, 48(2), 66–83.

20

One, Two, Three Montages … Harun Farocki’s War Documentaries Nora M. Alter

Paul Virilio, in his seminal book War and Cinema (French edition, 1984), posits the connection between war and technologies of vision and perception. He writes, “alongside the ‘war machine,’ there has always existed an ocular (and later optical and electro-optical) ‘watching machine’ capable of providing soldiers, and particularly commanders with a visual perspective on the military action under way” (1989: 4). Virilio begins his study in the early twentieth century with observations linking the emergence of various technologies including radio with the advent of war. In particular, Virilio focuses on Second World War bombers that were equipped with cameras to record the success (or failure) of their military sorties. Virilio goes on to conclude that “just as weapons and armor developed in unison throughout history, so visibility and invisibility now began to evolve together, eventually producing invisible weapons that make things visible.” Media theorist Friedrich Kittler picks up on Virilio’s hypothesis, but tracks it to the emergence of the dual technologies of recording and reproducing images: camera obscura and the magic lantern of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Kittler, in Optical Media (2002, trans. 2012), argues that neither of these optical devices could have developed without the codevelopment of a military use. The hand-in-hand development of audiovisual recording, storage, and distribution technologies proceeds lockstep with military advances to this day. If civilian radio was a product of the First World War and surveillance systems a product of the Second World War, then digital culture emerged from the Cold War. Just as technology and war have evolved over time, so too have the media and the  genre used to record and document them: namely documentary filmmaking. The genre of war photography emerged during the American Civil War. By the First A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

432

Nora M. Alter

World War, film was regularly employed to “capture” action shots of what was “really” happening. Ironically, this involved elaborate re-enactments since filming in the trenches was practically impossible with the slow film stock and heavy equipment. With the advent of the Second World War, film joined the arsenal of weapons in the form of documentary newsreels and propaganda. During the Vietnam War the technology of television broadcasting and simultaneous recording brought the war into living rooms throughout Western Europe and North America. In our digital era, a click of a mouse opens windows onto endless images recording death and destruction; some are from official sources, others have been informally posted. In addition to physical combat, wars are fought with sophisticated computer technology developed in tandem with the gaming industry. The boundary between virtual play and actual death is blurred both in and out of the war zone until a casualty occurs. Perhaps, more than almost any other filmmaker working today, Harun Farocki has been preoccupied by the relationship between war and technology.1 For over 50 years, since his first student films in the mid-1960s at the DFFB, Farocki has documented the mediatization of war. Unlike for the majority of non-fiction filmmakers who rely on “real” images in order to achieve their message, Farocki’s strategy relies on mediatization to access “reality” – war and violence are always represented as second and third hand signs – as illusion.

Vietnam Inside Ourselves Writing in 1989, filmmaker Harun Farocki observes: Much beautiful cinema has been born from the circumstance that someone was not allowed to show something and therefore replaced an illustration with an illusion, using omission as a means of allowing room for imagination … If one first looks at a light-colored symbol and then immediately afterwards at a black surface, a phantom image lingers for a moment – a physiological after-image. (2001a: 214)

Emerging as a filmmaker in the politically charged environment of the mid-1960s in West Berlin, Farocki’s early films, such as Anleitung, Polizisten den Helm abzureissen (How to Remove a Police Helmet, 1969), were marked by an agitprop style that encouraged direct action. During this early period, he developed a highly politicized form of guerilla filmmaking. The films directly address contemporary political situations, and their public consisted of like-minded individuals involved in antiauthoritarian struggles and public protest. For example, Die Worte des Vorsitzenden (The Words of the Chairman, 1967) opens with a masked woman (Ursula Lefkes) sitting at a desk leafing through a small book on Chairman Mao by Lin Piao. A female voice-over cites relevant passages and urges that Mao’s words and teachings be taken to a new level of engagement. The masked figure then tears pages from the book, and constructs a sophisticated paper airplane that is equipped with a dart-like



One, Two, Three Montages … Harun Farocki’s War Documentaries

433

weapon made of matches bound together around a needle. The reader launches the paper missile and it flies across space. The camera tracks the airplane’s course until it reaches its mark: a man and a woman dining at a fancy table. The latter are wearing paper bags on their heads on which are painted effigies of the Shah of Iran and his wife. As the weapon reaches its target, the Shah collapses, symbolically assassinated. The highly stylized theatrical quality of the plot of this and other early films is reminiscent of Brecht’s Lehrstücke or learning plays – short instructional pieces whose aim was to bring about revolutionary change. Although generally involved in protest and activism, it was the event of the US war in Vietnam in particular that engaged Farocki’s work. Beginning with White Christmas (1968), he juxtaposed images of Vietnam with the commercial “kitsch” of Christmas in North America and Europe.2 As Farocki explained in 1998: “The war which the United States waged against Vietnam was outrageous, first and foremost in its extreme cruelty. It assumed that civil society would regard it without interest or passion” (2001c: 272) Obviously, Farocki was not alone in his concern with the war in Southeast Asia. The war provoked widespread protest throughout the world. It became the focus of West German writers such as Peter Weiss, Günter Grass, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and others. The topic of Vietnam was mobilized not only as a political call to arms in solidarity with the North Vietnamese, but also as an indirect means through which to address Germany’s recent past and present (Alter, 1996). Poet Erich Fried devoted a collection of verse, Und Vietnam und (1966), to the antiwar movement, arguing that there are in fact “many Vietnams” in history and around the world (Alter, 1997a; 1997b). Protest against the war initially served to coalesce student activists, some of whom later became members of the Red Army Faction. In Germany, similarities were drawn between a “free” South Vietnam and a communist North Vietnam on the one hand, and a democratic West Germany (controlled and managed by former Allied Nations) and a communist East Germany (under Soviet control). Whereas the Korean War of the 1950s had garnered little popular attention in Western Europe, the Vietnam War served as a wake-up call. For the first time since the “liberation” of Europe from the throes of fascism, the United States came under criticism as a brutal imperialistic force that was waging an unethical and murderous campaign against a Third World primarily civilian population. The unrelenting carpet-bombing of Vietnam and its innumerable casualties and deaths reminded Germans in particular of the long-suppressed memory of the devastating fire-bombing of Dresden at the end of the Second World War. Further, the war in Southeast Asia called into question the presence of active US military bases throughout West Germany nearly 25 years after the conclusion of the Second World War. In the area of film production, the anti-war movement drew particular attention. Fidel Castro proclaimed 1967 as the global Year of Vietnam, and it was also the main theme of that year’s Leipzig Documentary Film Festival. Perhaps one of the most significant films that year was the omnibus production, Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam, 1967). A year later, East German documentary filmmakers Walter

434

Nora M. Alter

Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann produced their remarkable four-part, on-location series Pilots in Pyjamas (1968), a psychological portrait and investigation of the lives, backgrounds, and ideological makeup of downed US pilots imprisoned in Hanoi (Alter, 2002). In the United States, Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig (1969) was heralded as an extraordinary polemical documentary. Film was seen as a weapon for combating imperialism – the camera functioned as a gun, and the shots produced images for the world to see. One of Farocki’s most celebrated films from his early period, Inextinguishable Fire, explicitly responds to the Vietnam War.3 Sadly, true to its title, Inextinguishable Fire has relevance today in our context of perpetual war where unrelenting assaults against civilians and unbelievable violence with overkill weaponry continues unabated. Specifically, Inextinguishable Fire concerns the use and horrific effects of Dow Chemical Company’s newly manufactured weapon: Napalm. Produced in 1969 during the height of protest against the war in Vietnam, the film directly confronts audiences and their tacit support of the United States through their passivity. The short film is divided into three parts: in Part One – the best known – Farocki reads an account of a Napalm attack; Part Two stages several fictional scenes set in a Dow Chemical Plant; Part Three consists of a short skit of a worker, a student, and an engineer. The film is a curious blend of fact and fiction. Unlike the documentaries of either de Antonio or Heynowski and Scheumann, Farocki’s style is similar to some of the contributors of Far from Vietnam, especially those segments credited to Jean-Luc Godard. Since, with the exception of Joris Ivens, none of the filmmakers were granted visas to travel to Vietnam, that film was a hybrid quasi-fictional quasifactual product for which the directors had to recreate Vietnam. Farocki follows this hybrid formal gesture that eschews genre classification in favor of what I have referred to elsewhere as an essay film. Just like the majority of sequences in Far from Vietnam, in Inextinguishable Fire images of the war are all second-hand images, not shot by Farocki or his team. In his 1982 essay, “Dog from the Freeway,” Farocki (2004a) alludes to the importance of Godard’s contribution to Far from Vietnam by quoting at length from Susan Sontag’s Trip to Hanoi (1968: 18–19) in which she mentions Godard. The tactic of citing from another source without comment parallels Farocki’s cinematic strategy of montage, compilation, and the extensive use of found footage. Assuming an anti-auteurist stance, he once questioned why new images should be made since there are so many already out there. However, embedded in this methodological position are the difficult material circumstances surrounding the first four decades of Farocki’s filmmaking. Maintaining a leftist position, Farocki was on the margins both in terms of politics and in terms of form. Formally, this manifests itself in his denial of the strictures of genre production, be they the formal guidelines of documentary or the rules of the game for features. Filming against the grain, Farocki produces what he terms a “form of intelligence” that includes essay films, skits, compilation films, pamphlet films, and other forms of non-fiction. Precisely because Farocki’s work refuses easy categorization, funding and financial support was difficult to obtain and he often had to make films with a bare-bones budget.4 To that extent, Farocki’s work



One, Two, Three Montages … Harun Farocki’s War Documentaries

435

resonates with Solanas and Getino’s 1971 manifesto, “Towards a Third Cinema,” that calls for new forms of revolutionary cinematic production that lie outside the dominant modes of first cinema (Hollywood) and second cinema (art cinema).5 Practically, this meant using limited resources effectively. In his first full-length film, Zwischen zwei Kriegen (Between Two Wars, 1978), Farocki delivers the following statement: When one doesn’t have money for cars, shooting, nice clothes, when one doesn’t have money to make images in which film time and film life flow uninterruptedly, then one has to put one’s efforts into intelligently putting together separate elements: a montage of ideas.

An economy of means requires a creative thinking about alternative ways of producing images: the solution is located in montage and editing. Often the source for Farocki’s montages is previously manufactured images.6 His films are marked by the assemblage of footage from feature films, advertisements, documentaries, photographs, as well as his own work. For example, his footage from an industrial film on automobile production resurfaces in Images of the World. Farocki refers to this working method as a Verbundsystem (integrated system): Following the example of the steel industry … I try to create a Verbund with my work. The basic research for a project I finance with a radio broadcast, some of the books I use I review for the book programs, and many of the things I notice during this kind of work end up in my television features. (Farocki, 1975)

What began, however, as an economic necessity developed into a powerful system of critique – using the media produced by another to comment on that system – turning it against itself in an act of Brechtian refunctioning or Situationist détournement. In Part One of Inextinguishable Fire, Farocki, formally attired in a dark suit with a tie, sits at a bare office desk and reads a text. Cast in the role of a television news anchor, he recites the powerful testimony of That Binh Danh, a citizen of Vietnam who experienced the horrible effects of Napalm: “The flames and unbearable heat engulfed me and I lost consciousness. Napalm burned my face, both arms and legs. … For thirteen days I was unconscious.” Farocki then turns away from reading the testimony, looks into the camera, and asks, “How can we show you the damage caused by napalm?” A common response to horror, he notes, is to close one’s eyes, or to look away. So rather than showing documentary images, he proposes to “give a weak demonstration of how Napalm works.” That demonstration consists of burning his left forearm with a lit cigarette (Figure 20.1). He explains, “A cigarette burns at 400 degrees. Napalm burns at 3000 degrees.” With this act, which has been interpreted as a literalization of the idiomatic expression in German and French, “to put your hand in the fire,” with reference to political action and responsibility, Farocki implicates the spectator in a novel way (Didi-Huberman, 2009: 42). This “weak

436

Nora M. Alter

Figure 20.1  Inextinguishable Fire (Harun Farocki, 1969, produced by Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin).

demonstration” also recalls an episode in Far from Vietnam in which the widow of Norman Morrison explains that her husband immolated himself on the steps of the Pentagon in order to evoke the burning bodies in Vietnam. The dynamic starts a chain reaction whereby the effects of Napalm are passed from those in the war zone, to those reporting about the horrors of the war zone, and finally to those watching the reports. Part Two, by far the longest of the three parts, changes locales. It is staged in a Dow Chemical plant in Michigan. It includes experiments on rats, and a series of fictional (albeit based on official Dow press releases) conversations about Napalm between plant managers, scientists, engineers, US State Department officials, and workers. The characters participate in complex economic and philosophical debates about the relation of Napalm to the military-industrial complex.7 In addition to the highly stylized philosophical rhetorical dialogues, Farocki employs intertitles and inserts documentary footage consisting of North American nightly news television broadcast reports from Vietnam. Farocki’s camera closes in on the television set until the image on the television screen and that of the set merge and become one (Figure 20.2). This is followed by a sequence that links the workers in factories that produced the atomic bomb to those at the Dow Chemical plant. A direct link is established between Hiroshima and Vietnam.8 The commentary asserts that by the time the workers who produced the atomic bomb realized their culpability it was “too late.” The film then cuts back to the Michigan plant to arguments made by plant managers that Napalm ultimately saves lives and lectures on economic production. The final shot focuses on the chief chemist who notes that at Harvard University students are protesting Dow Chemical company but, as she explains with a shrug getting into her luxury car, Napalm is only one of 600 different useful products that



One, Two, Three Montages … Harun Farocki’s War Documentaries

437

Figure 20.2  Inextinguishable Fire (Harun Farocki, 1969, produced by Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin).

Dow makes including coconut oil and pesticides necessary for agricultural productivity. Part Three of Inextinguishable Fire is set in the washroom of a vacuum cleaner factory. The first character, a worker, explains that since his wife wants a vacuum at home, he has begun to steal one component everyday with the goal of reassembling a vacuum cleaner. However, he states in a punch line, the result of the reassembly is always a submachine gun. The second character repeats the scene. But in this case it is a student who is convinced that the vacuum cleaner factory is actually manufacturing submachine guns for Portugal. He steals parts to reconstitute the weapon and thereby expose the real mission of the factory; and yet, the result of his reassembly is always a vacuum cleaner. The third character, an engineer, works in the same factory. He concludes that although the workers think they are making vacuum cleaners and the students think they are making submachine guns, both are right, and he demonstrates that the vacuum cleaner can become a powerful weapon and that the submachine gun can have significant domestic home use. Thus the two functions become inextricably intertwined. The same actor plays all three roles. The film concludes with the statement: “What we manufacture depends on the workers, the students, and the engineers.” Thus all are implicated in the military industrial complex. In Inextinguishable Fire, Farocki worked in a hybrid style that did not adhere to the strict standards of documentary of the time as set forth either in cinéma vérité or American Direct Cinema. The short is clearly a fictional construction, yet it is also made up of fact, documents, and records. Various testimonials and official pronouncements are ventriloquized. What is striking is the mode of delivery, a highly stylized monotone that functions as an aural Brechtian gestus heightening the

438

Nora M. Alter

alienation effect.9 The use of intertitles, television footage, theatrical staging, and the like, all serve to remind the spectator that s/he is watching a film.10 In particular, the reliance on found television footage to impart images of the war underscores the mediatization of the first “television war,” as nightly news spectacle. In the post-1945 era, the average Western civilian does not experience war first-hand but only second-hand through its images. And yet, by focusing on the Dow Chemical plant that produces both weaponry and domestic products, Farocki underscores that there are only a few degrees of separation between viewers in the comfort of their homes and the war in Vietnam. Farocki’s use of a hybrid documentary/fictional structure connects to the German tradition of the essay film beginning in the late 1920s with Hans Richter. Within that tradition, the formal blurring of generic categories of classification is bound inextricably to its politics (see Hohendahl, 1997). As Theodor W. Adorno argues in “The Essay as Form,” “the essay’s innermost formal law is heresy. Through violations of thought, something in the object becomes visible which is orthodoxy’s secret and objective aim to keep invisible” (1991: 23).11

Cold Wars – Cool Media The 1970s ushered in a new era characterized by the squelching of protest throughout the Western world. Events such as the brutal murder of four students by the National Guard at Kent State in 1970, the assassination of revolutionary heroes such as Malcolm X (1965) and Che Guevara (1967), the CIA-assisted coup in Chile (1973), the deaths of former RAF members Holger Meins (1974), Ulrike Meinhof (1976), Gudrun Ensslin (1977), Andreas Baader (1977), and Jan-Carl Raspe (1977), all served to undermine revolutionary politics. The 1980s were marked by unbridled economic growth and deregulation, enabled by conservative Western leaders: Helmut Kohl (1982–1998); Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990); and Ronald Reagan (1981–1989). West Germany reaped the fruits of the economic miracle and had transformed itself into an economic superpower. Militant politics were exchanged for a new type of underground politics. During this time, the majority of Farocki’s work was in the genre of non-fiction, spanning a broad range of topics – from a close analysis of a photo shoot for a pornography magazine in Ein Bild (An Image, 1983), a film portrait of Peter Lorre in Peter Lorre – Das doppelte Gesicht (The Double Face of Peter Lorre, 1984), to filmed interviews with important cultural/intellectual figures such as Heiner Müller (1983) and Vilém Flusser (1986). In 1986, Farocki made Wie man sieht (As You See), a meditation on the nature of vision and the vast network of images: their formation, construction, effect, and circulation. As You See is a precursor both formally and thematically to Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1988).12 Images of the World focuses primarily on the inextricable relationship between technologies of vision and military developments. Inspired by the theories of Virilio and Kittler, Farocki investigates how wars produce, generate, record, document, and archive images.



One, Two, Three Montages … Harun Farocki’s War Documentaries

439

There are several wars at play in this dense multilayered film: most predominantly, the Second World War, but also the Algerian war of independence, and the Cold War. That perhaps is Farocki’s biggest challenge – how to represent a war whose primary evidence is ideological?13 Images of the World is an essay film that articulates the formal and aesthetic with the historical and political in the context of contemporary mass media, technoculture, and technowarfare. It is a profound meditation on the relation between vision and visuality and the increasingly technologically bound nature of representation and truth. The film interrogates photographic processes of image-making and the surrounding disciplines that use these images: fine arts, engineering, architecture, artisanal and assembly-line production, city planning and urban renewal, military science and practice. As with Inextinguishable Fire, Images of the World demonstrates that all systems are interrelated and that there is no outside to the military industrial complex. Not even a nation such as West Germany during times of relative “peace” is free from this dynamic. In Images of the World, Farocki examines the political in/visible or im/perceptible – what we see and what we don’t see – that which is often veiled and/or camouflaged. To that extent, the film functions as a puzzle-picture, which Adorno has characterized as “a good-natured reprise of the serious vexation perpetrated by every art work. Like art it hides something while at the same time showing it” (1984: 178), like the image of a duck that may be that of a rabbit depending on how one looks. Farocki’s film defends Walter Benjamin’s theory of an optical unconscious (see Lebow’s essay in this volume, Chapter 21) or Roland Barthes’s “third meaning,” both of which postulate that the camera eye often records evidence that may elude the human eye. Images of the World, a compilation film, is constructed out of a variety of archival sources: photographs, industrial films, commercial video records, and the like. The multiplicity and heterogeneity of the building blocks enables Farocki to structure it not only visually but also “musically” so that each social practice he depicts can be associated with key images that recur in a more or less rhythmic fashion with thematic variations. These include sequences taken from a Hannover water-research laboratory; Allied photographs of the IG Farben factory in Auschwitz; images from Alfred Meydenbauer (the inventor of scale measurement by the use of photography); photographs taken by SS officers in Auschwitz; pictures of unveiled Algerian women taken in 1960 by French soldiers; drawings of the Auschwitz camp made by an inmate, Alfred Kantor; a Serge Lutens model being made up in Cologne; an art school class; and relatively high-tech (at the time) computer-generated images, robotized industrial production lines, and flight simulators. What Images of the World’s image track suggests is that the historical purpose of photography – whether scientific, military, forensic, or aesthetic – has been not only to record and preserve but also to mislead, deceive, and even destroy: that is to aid but also to obfuscate vision. Much time is spent closely analyzing the Allied photographs of the IG Farben plant demonstrating that the photographers unwittingly also captured images of the Auschwitz concentration camp including the crematorium, lines of victims, and the gas chambers. However, because reconnaissance specialists were not looking for

440

Nora M. Alter

death camps but rather for the factory they did not see the evidence of mass extermination before their eyes. Yet, the optical unconscious of the camera captured the deadly process. Part of Farocki’s project in Images of the World is thus to show the in/ visible – or the ugly witch in the beautiful young woman of the picture puzzle. If, following Adorno’s theory of the picture puzzle, it is ideology that obscures one image and lets another shine forth, then in this film it is both the ideology behind the image-maker as well as that of the viewer that determines the way war is documented/inscribed. Three of Farocki’s image sequences are notable for the manner in which they draw attention to women. The first is an analysis of a woman who has just arrived at Auschwitz and whom Farocki characterizes as beautiful; the second is the series of photographs of Berber women who have been photographed by military police in Algeria because they are suspected of being criminals; and the third sequence towards the end of the film is that of a smiling female prisoner in Auschwitz. Of the latter, the commentary recites: “In Auschwitz, apart from death and work, there was a black market, there were love stories and resistance groups.” In addition, three rhythmically inserted sequences show a series of handwritten numbers on a slip of paper. The narrator explains that these are “coded messages from Auschwitz prisoners who belonged to a resistance group. They set a date for an uprising. … With explosive devices made from powder that women had smuggled out from the Union Munitions factory, they set fire to the crematorium.” Farocki weaves together these multiple image sequences combined with the use of a female voice-over to bring forth a previously invisible and inaudible history of women as resistance fighters. But there is more, Images of the World is not just about the past but is also deeply concerned with the present. Just as Farocki has subjected archival images to a probing analysis, his film beckons the contemporary viewer to do the same with the material he has assembled. In a film that centers so much on concealment and disguise, what is Farocki’s camouflaged secret text? In the penultimate image sequence the commentary states: In 1983, as the number of atomic weapons in the Federal Republic of Germany was to  be increased again, Günter Anders recalled the failure to bomb Auschwitz and demanded: “The reality must begin … That means: the blockading of all entrance to murder installations which permanently persist … let us destroy the possibility of access to these weapons.“

This declaration is followed by a drawing from inmate Alfred Kantor calling for the  blockading of train tracks bringing prisoners to Auschwitz (Figure  20.3). By extension then, Images of the World may be read as a highly coded message at the height of the Cold War calling for the disruption of train lines leading to the atomic weapons placed in Germany. This work thereby continues the agitprop tradition begun two decades earlier that calls for direct political action, albeit more subtly. To that extent, in the late 1980s, Farocki’s guerilla style of filmmaking has gone underground and become in/visible.



One, Two, Three Montages … Harun Farocki’s War Documentaries

441

Figure 20.3  Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun Farocki, 1989, produced by Harun Farocki Filmproduktion).

Another sequence of images in Images of the World merits mention: the recurrence of relatively “primitive” but at the time quite sophisticated computer-generated proto-virtual reality military training programs. In a gesture reminiscent of the filming of the television screen in Inextinguishable Fire, Farocki includes these sequences of a “second-hand” technologically manufactured vision. These digital images comment on the lack of a negative or “real” in the transfer from analog to digital production and also proleptically suggest their use in future wars. However, as images without negatives, they also raise the question as to their future archival potential. Images of the World is a documentary in the form of an essay film that follows Adorno’s thesis on the literary/philosophical genre. Adorno argues that in an age of persistent and irreversible methodological reduction to scientism and instrumentality, “in the realm of thought it is virtually the essay alone that has successfully raised doubts about the absolute privilege of method” (1991: 9). Among the various secondary features of the essay film, Farocki’s work most manifestly displays techniques requiring reading between the lines, or locating messages in the gaps between documentary and fiction, truth and fantasy. It is in breaks, reiterations, ambiguities, veiled prolapses, anachronisms, misdirections, verbal or visual puns, and other free-play spaces of essay films that politics are revealed. Images of the World qualifies as a “form of intelligence,” and, to yield its full impact, its text must be actively co-produced by the spectator. Images of the World was produced on the brink of the collapse of the Cold War order and rise of digital media. Up to this point, Farocki practiced Soviet-style montage. As he explains in an early 1990s interview: “Montage for the Soviets meant the juxtaposition of ideas. For the Americans it meant instead the juxtaposition of

442

Nora M. Alter

narrative components” (Farocki and Silverman, 1993: 63). Montage, in these films, is linear, and unfolds 24 frames a second as one image follows another. Farocki relies on multiple fragments of found footage, each of which contain shards of a documentary truth to construct his film. We are again reminded of Adorno’s observations on the essay: “It thinks in fragments, just as reality is fragmentary, and finds its unity in and through breaks and not by glossing them over” (1991: 16). The reality shines through in the sutures and cuts between the rapid successions of image blocks. However, in the mid-1990s with the entry of documentary film into exhibition spaces, single-channel projections gave way to experiments with multi-channel, three-dimensional installations. This new viewing format for film, in which multiple image sequences might appear simultaneously, had a profound effect on Farocki’s concept of montage, not only materially, but also spatially and conceptually.

Hot War / Hot Gallery Reminiscing with a tinge of nostalgia, Farocki recalls in 1999: Touching the reel was pleasantly reassuring – like when you open a book and know immediately where you are in the book … there was always the idea that future projection would turn the caterpillar into a butterfly – you don’t get that with electronic images. There, you are dealing with two images! On the right is the edited image; on the left, the next image to be added on. The right image makes a demand, but is also being criticised by the left one, sometimes even condemned. This made me experiment with double projection works … One image doesn’t take the place of the previous one, but supplements it, re-evaluates it, balances it. (2004c: 302)

In 1989 with the dissolution of the former Soviet Union and the conversion of its satellite countries to “Western democracy,” the Cold War officially ended. The closer integration of the European Union (under the Maastricht Treaty) in 1993 initiated, amongst other important changes, a restructuring of funding opportunities in the arts. Regional national television stations had their funds reduced and film projects ceased to be funded unless they were truly trans-European.14 Concomitant with the decrease in resources available for independent filmmakers, two other developments significantly affected artists like Farocki. After decades of marginalization, film and video projects were finally accepted by museums, more or less equivalent to painting, sculpture, photography, and the like. Moving images seemed to explode in exhibition space, which in turn led to new sources of funding for production, exhibition, and distribution. Instead of negotiating with a television network such as WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk), filmmakers began to look to galleries, museums, and exhibition venues such as the Venice Biennale or Documenta for production support.15 One important question that arises, then, is what happens to the documentary genre when it is framed as art?16 This shift from cinema theaters and



One, Two, Three Montages … Harun Farocki’s War Documentaries

443

television broadcasts to art spaces also brought about significant changes not only in the metamorphoses of “filmmaker” to “artist,” but in the product and its status. There followed a radical rethinking of image-making processes that with few exceptions (such as Warhol’s Chelsea Girls or Godard’s Numéro deux) had been conceived of as single-channel projections. Films and videos were no longer only screened in separate theaters as parts of museums, but were put into galleries, staged and produced for them. These three-dimensional exhibition spaces encouraged multiple channels and screens, which generated new ways of thinking about space – a space in which a mobile spectator could navigate relatively unrestricted, both temporally or spatially. Multiple screens and projections could be experienced simultaneously, conversations could be held, and the rooms were often brightly lit. This type of viewing experience stands in sharp contrast to the ritual of sitting immersed quietly in a dark theater focused on a single set of images for a prescribed period of time.17 In addition to fundamental changes in funding, exhibition, and distribution venues, 1989 brought about a revolution in audiovisual production from analog to digital. This paradigm shift had an effect on every aspect of filmmaking, from cameras, to sound, to distribution, to Internet resources and archives, to editing. In particular, access to a vast virtual archive and desktop digital editing systems have had a profound effect on Farocki’s production. Both formal and institutional changes are manifest in the new framing of his work. If, during the first three decades of his career, Farocki was an avant-garde or alternative filmmaker working on the fringes of German cinema, from the mid-1990s onward he has become an “international media artist,” with multiple solo exhibitions in prestigious venues. Yet, although the formal dimension of Farocki’s work has undergone significant changes, his engagement with technologies of seeing and his systematic critique of images continues as a central concern. Farocki first tackles this new exhibition venue and mode of production in his two-screen installation Schnittstelle (1995). For this project, Farocki employs two separate screens within one viewing space to create what he refers to as “soft montage.” This unique form of montage is comprised of a “general relatedness” of images,” “rather than a strict opposition of equation” produced by a linear montage of sharp cuts (Farocki and Silverman, 1998: 142). Like the early photomontages of John Heartfield or Hannah Höch, soft montage juxtaposes multiple images simultaneously. Associations are suggested spatially but not formally mandated temporally. As such, Farocki moves beyond the horizontal dialectical montage of Sergei Eisenstein, in which meaning is constructed through a linear succession of images, towards a practice in which discrete units occupy the same visual space. This form of montage is essentially a filmic parallel to Adorno’s essayist schema in which “discrete elements are set off against one another and come together to form a readable context … [as] the elements crystallize as a configuration through their motion” (1991: 13). This change in montage is directly related to conceptual transformations made possible by the shift from analog to digital editing. As the US military expanded its adventures in the Middle East, Farocki resumed his investigations of the relationship between war and media. Both his single-channel

444

Nora M. Alter

War at a Distance (2003), intended for theatrical screenings, and his three-part double-channel video installation, Eye/Machine (2000), Eye/Machine II (2001), and Eye/ Machine III (2003), interrogate technologically mechanized vision. Both singlechannel film and the installation rely on a remixing of the same basic footage. Both War at a Distance and Eye/Machine open with images taken by “suicide cameras” during the US bombing of Iraq during the (1990–1991) Gulf War. For the most part, the video runs in complete silence, with a written text appearing isolated in its own frame. In the case of War at a Distance it is often only the words that appear before the spectator, while with the dual monitor installation, images play on the opposite monitor. The commentary bluntly states, “The war was soon forgotten.” The images from the Gulf War are followed by images of an array of intelligence weapons, including bomb detectors, mobile surveillance machines, and medical cameras. Eye/ Machine underscores the dialectic of these “camera eyes,” which are at once benevolently utilized to perform minimally invasive surgery in medicine and malevolently employed to wage deadly “surgical strikes” in war. Farocki proposes that with global cameras there is “no real need to invade foreign space in order to collect data,” and suggests that in future, war’s human targets too will likely be obsolete. The viewer is never quite sure of what s/he is seeing and is thus made to feel remote and detached. Anticipating this alienation, the commentary declares, “without connecting to everyday experiences the images fail to grip.” Indeed, almost none of the images are the product of a human eye looking through a camera; instead, they have all been produced entirely by computer-programmed machines. Sometimes video images of the machine in question appear on one screen, while the other depicts the “secondhand” images produced by these very machines. The text observes that industrial labor has replaced not only manual but also visual work, for these machines are utterly devoid of social context. The result is a proliferation of images “of the world to be processed,” as technological vision comes to fully supplant natural vision. An evolution of images generated by war occurs from the television sequences captured in Inextinguishable Fire to the simulated computer-training program in Images of the World. In Eye/Machine the change also takes place both structurally and materially as he works in the same medium that he critiques. Farocki’s exhibition format is markedly different from the single-channel projection. Farocki conceived of Eye/Machine as a double projection with the two videotapes designed to be projected in a continuous loop onto a large single screen in the exhibition space. In Eye/Machine II and III, he utilizes two separate screens thereby increasing the distance between the images. The installation transforms the content of the videotapes in several ways. First, the continuous loop at once recalls the constant replay of media images on television, as well as satellite surveillance cameras that continuously record visual matter. Secondly, the silence of the installation places the spectator in the position of a surveiller of information. The piece thus stimulates vision, but in an alienated and meaningless way, and the viewer functions as a silent observer watching mute images.. Thirdly, the effect of having two discrete image tracks to watch simultaneously dramatically alters the way in which the information is processed. As Farocki explains earlier when working on Schnittstelle,



One, Two, Three Montages … Harun Farocki’s War Documentaries

445

“This made me experiment with double projections works … One image doesn’t take the place of the previous one, but supplements it, re-evaluates it, balances it” (2004c: 302). The use of double-screen soft montage creates a mediated dialogic space between the two images within which unexpected associations emerge. By creating a space in between the two tracks, Farocki interrupts the mechanized image-making systems and restores the gap between – namely, natural vision. In contrast to a single-channel videotape that would impose a monocular technologized vision on the spectator by the very nature of its regime, the two-channel installation further opens a space for thought, interpretation, and reflection. The associations constructed by the viewer form a historical narrative – one that the viewer plays an active role in putting together. To that extent, although employing a different formal gesture, the goal is the same as in Inextinguishable Fire: to activate the spectator. Farocki’s use of montage, whether linear or spatial, recalls Adorno’s advice on finding a film form that “neither lapses into arts-and-crafts, nor slips into a mere documentary.” The form he recommends is “that of montage which does not interfere with things but rather arranges them in a constellation akin to that of writing” (1981–1982: 203, my emphasis). But what sort of evidence or historical trace do these images leave? Can one construct a memory from images that have not been taken by humans? Recall that the videotape’s opening text maintains, “The war was soon forgotten.” The implication is that for most viewers the images of the Gulf War were completely abstracted and at times unrecognizable. Without any connection to the real, they failed to “grip.” War thus resembles a cheap computer game; it is hard to imagine a less dramatic representation. In turn, history is transformed into a simulation for which the digital video medium is particularly attuned. “The war was soon forgotten,” or rather “replaced.” As the United States embarked on the Iraq War of 2003 onward, Farocki addresses an increasingly technologized and mediated practice of warfare in his four-part Serious Games I–IV, consisting of: I: Watson Is Down (2010); II: Three Dead (2010); III: Immersion (2009); and IV: A Sun with No Shadow (2010). If in the Eye/Machine series and in War at a Distance the theater of war was played, for the most part, in a faraway land, Serious Games brings war back “home” to the United States. Parts I, III, and IV consist of a doublechannel looped video projection; only Part II: Three Dead is a single screen. Footage is taken from two military bases in the United States: Twentynine Palms, California and Fort Lewis, Washington. In the former, in “Military Operations in Urban Terrain MOUT,” soldiers are trained through sophisticated gaming programs to prepare for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a virtual environment, called Virtual Battle Space, they maneuver tanks, go out on sorties, engage in battle, shoot and kill enemy “combatants” and civilians. They learn how to read the subtle signs of the desert and inhabitants, how to anticipate and avoid an ambush. For months they train in this digital environment prior to deployment.18 Farocki (2011) notes that the soldiers, sitting at their computer terminals “immersed” in their games, look more like bureaucrats or IT specialists than soldiers. Twentynine Palms functions as both a

446

Nora M. Alter

Figure 20.4  Serious Games I: Watson Is Down (Harun Farocki, 2010, produced by Harun Farocki Filmproduktion).

real and a virtual pre-departure training site. The single-screen format simulates the single-minded focus of the soldiers being trained where, as they prepare for war, no plurality of vision or space for critique is allowed. Fort Lewis, however, may be more closely linked to post-production, or the process wherein the aftermath of film shooting or a battle the product is analyzed and reassembled. There Farocki films educational seminars where private industry peddles computer software to military therapists treating veterans. Programs such as Virtual Iraq are developed to help patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders to overcome their psychoses. The patient provides the therapist with details that lead to the trauma so that the therapist may set the program accordingly. The patient wears a camouflage uniform and sophisticated headgear that recreates sounds, images, and even smells. As he describes what he is experiencing to a therapist, the latter alters the VR environment so that it corresponds to the patient’s experiences. In Immersion, Farocki records one such training session. On the right screen are images of the “soldier” recounting his traumatic memory, while on the left screen the computer images generated by his narrative are interspersed with shots of the therapist. Farocki explains his recourse to two separate screens as a strategy by which to “create a very obvious off-space with these two images, because the audience is always in the ‘off ’” (2012, 73). The VR headgear and goggles engulf the head of the patient, depersonalizing him for the viewer. The dialogue, however, seems very “real” as the “soldier” becomes silent, sweating, agitated and has to be prodded by the “therapist” to recount the horror of discovering a body blown apart: “and there’s flesh, and there’s blood, and there’s bits of uniforms and it’s … it was … and I’m like shit! So at this point I’m just freaking out. I’m thinking I’m going to die.” At this point, the scene abruptly ends. As the actor removes his VR goggles we are made aware of the fact that this was advanced role-playing for marketing purposes.19 During his investigations at Fort White, and through conversations with soldiers who had undergone or were planning to undergo this therapy, Farocki learned that the use of virtual video games made the therapy more acceptable to the soldiers. The latter would rather tell their friends that they were going to play games than that



One, Two, Three Montages … Harun Farocki’s War Documentaries

447

Figure 20.5  Serious Games III: Immersion (Harun Farocki, 2009, produced by Harun Farocki Filmproduktion).

they were going to seek help. Farocki also found that the image quality of the programs was actually inferior to that of comparable games on the commercial market due to the fact that the budget for gaming industry is approximately tenfold that of therapy. This led him to carefully compare the programs and quality images from Virtual Iraq to those used in Virtual Battle Space. In the latter the “reality” effect is far more developed. The scenes are constructed based on cinematographic principles of staging, montage, and effects. Thus, in one VBS scenario, a flock of birds is produced. This detail is unmotivated, and is merely part of the “reality effect,” similar to a typical strategy of fictional films whereby a secondary scene that is not crucial to the narrative is inserted to make the diegetic world more believable.20 Through his study of images, Farocki discovers that not only is there a gross disparity in image quality between commercial video games and therapeutic technology, but that this disparity is even greater between the military preparatory games and immersion technology. No expense is spared in the creation of the technology used to train soldiers, but significant short cuts are taken in the production of healing technology. This disjunctive gap in production values is addressed in A Sun with No Shadow. Here, Farocki draws attention to the fact that in the virtual scene created for training many details are embedded in the setting (including accurate shadows cast by the sun), however, no shadows exist in the therapeutic world. This detail functions as a Brechtian gestus, containing within it a profound social commentary and critique.21 The computer games that prepare the military for war are then used to bring them back to the normalcy of civilian life. In the space in between, a war is fought that jars them into an actuality with palpable lasting effects that cannot be simply deleted or shut off with the removal of an unwieldy VR helmet or the transport back home. The blurring between war games and civilian life recalls the final act of Inextinguishable Fire that demonstrates how war penetrates all spheres. The installation of Serious Games I–IV is different from that of Farocki’s other war pieces. Whereas Inextinguishable Fire and Images of the World are projected on a single screen affixed to the wall, and the two channels of Eye/Machine are also mounted on a wall, Serious Games is more sculptural. The screens are located in the middle of the

448

Nora M. Alter

Figure 20.6–20.10  Serious Games IV: A Sun with No Shadow (Harun Farocki, 2010, produced by Harun Farocki Filmproduktion).



One, Two, Three Montages … Harun Farocki’s War Documentaries

449

exhibition space, and may be viewed from both sides. The installation thus requires that the spectator ambulate around each of the four parts, taking in the projections from multiple vantage points. All the while, the bodies of other spectators move freely, with some obstructing the view. The spectatorial experience is radically different from what one would normally encounter in a cinema and the shift from stationary to mobile spectator further affects the montage. If Farocki argues that in soft montage the space between the two fixed elements or images produces thought or meaning, in Serious Games the montage occurs in the space between the body of the viewer and that of screen. In sharp contrast to a VR world in which simulations of movement take place through artificially constructed landscapes, within the i­nstallation the reality of the spectatorial body invokes the reality of the war. The documentary “real” emerges in the gallery, where the active engagement with the public is in direct contrast to the remote manner in which virtual weapons are used to wage war. Over the past half century, Farocki’s documentary style of filmmaking has adapted to accommodate not only new forms of technology, but also new formats of ­distribution and exhibition. With each shift in his filmmaking practice he has reconsidered the most effective means through which to employ montage to activate the viewing subject. Consistent throughout his practice, has been an engagement with the way in which war is presented to those who experience it at a distance. News broadcasts, photographs, then computer programs, and the like, are mobilized to document how war is communicated to remote publics. Farocki seeks at once to reactivate the passive and numbing effects of war’s mediatic transformation, and through filmed scenes (such as burning a cigarette on his forearm) or his immersive installations, to remind audiences of the horrible reality of war. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Harun Farocki (1944–2014) and his lifelong commitment to educating and engaging the public.

Notes 1 I am cautious about applying a thematic approach such as “war” to classify part of Farocki’s oeuvre, aware of his own words, “Politics becomes a specialization, like sex. Today there are women’s films, gay films, minority films. Once there were points; today there are topics” (2001b: 223). 2 Farocki recalls, “At the beginning of 1968, I went to see him [Holger Meins] at his apartment on Hauptstrasse in Berlin-Schöneberg. I had with me a photograph the size of a newspaper, printed on a card. It showed a Vietnamese woman holding an injured or perhaps dead child in her arms. (I was working on a small film that was supposed to show a connection between Christmas kitsch in Europe and the U.S. with the war in Vietnam.)” (2001c: 280). 3 Inextinguishable Fire continues to have a vivid afterlife. Not only is it one of the only early films that Farocki continues to screen in programs or install alongside his contemporary work (most recently in his 2011 solo MoMA exhibition), but it was the source of filmmaker Jill Godmilow’s What Farocki Taught (1998).

450

Nora M. Alter

4 On Farocki’s difficulties in receiving public financing for his projects see his response in 1993 to Thomas Elsaesser on this topic: “In the case of Between Two Wars, I tried twentyfive times or so to get the finances together, but in the end, I had to produce it without public money, and instead used some 30,000 German Marks that I had earned with other film work” (Farocki, 2004b: 179). 5 Solanas and Getino (1971) emphatically state: “the cinema known as documentary, with all the vastness that the concept has today, from educational film to the reconstruction of fact or a historical event, is perhaps the main basis of revolutionary filmmaking. Every image that documents, bears witness to, refutes or deepens the truth of a situation is something more than a film image or a purely artistic fact; it becomes something which the System finds indigestible.” 6 The 1920s Soviet filmmaker Esther Shub, who relied on previously shot or existent material to produce her “compilation films,” first perfected this method. For an excellent study on the use of found footage or “second-hand images” in film including in the work of Farocki, see Blümlinger (2009). 7 For an excellent analysis of this film see Diedrich Diederichsen’s essay “Napalm Death.” Diederichsen links Farocki’s meditation on Napalm to IG Farben’s manufacture of Zyklon B Gas used in the concentration camps. He concludes: “The tertium comparationis between Nazi regime and Vietnam War would therefore not be described from a perspective of geopolitics or culture war (Kulturkampf) but from a perspective critical of capitalism, one which specifies the roles of corporations and describes them according to the way they are organized under specific capitalist conditions” (2009: 55). 8 In an interview three decades later with Jill Godmilow, Farocki comments: “I’m ashamed that in my film I use examples of Hiroshima and Vietnam and don’t say Auschwitz” (Farocki, 2005: 154). 9 As Farocki recalls, “The producer at WDR, Reinhold W. Thiel, thought that the actors’ way of speaking and acting was not stylized enough, or stylized in the wrong way and proposed that all the actors should be dubbed by two voices. Night after night I edited the working prints into synchronized loops” (Farocki, 2009: 222). 10 Thirteen years after Inextinguishable Fire, Farocki revisited the topic of Vietnam in Before Your Eyes: Vietnam (1981). Unlike his earlier film, Before Your Eyes drops the openly confrontational style of filmmaking in favor of a reflective, distanced, semi-fictional meditation that seeks to analyze how what was once a “real” war has been relegated to an archive of images. In this fictional love story, Farocki challenges the viewer to learn about Vietnam and the war once it is over. As the character named Robert says to his companion while both stare at a mirror: “It’s like a trailer for a war film: An exciting love story against the background of war and genocide.” Vietnam has become a set. 11 Farocki was impacted by Adorno’s writings and reprinted several of the philosopher’s essays in the journal Filmkritik, which Farocki was editing at the time. 12 The following discussion is derived in large part from my earlier in-depth analyses of Images of the World (Alter 1996, 2002, 2004). 13 Farocki represents other types of war such as “class war” in his Zwischen zwei Kriegen (Between Two Wars, 1978) or most recently colonialism in The Silver and the Cross (2010). 14 Throughout his career, as with other avant-garde European filmmakers, Farocki has relied heavily on regional television networks to produce and distribute his films. Unlike in the United States, television was a major source of funding for cultural and creative arts.



One, Two, Three Montages … Harun Farocki’s War Documentaries

451

15 In addition, in terms of genre, there has been surge in non-fiction and/or documentary audiovisual production in the art world. The past three Documentas, the bellwether quinquennial exhibition, featured work by filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman, Ulrike Ottinger, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Isaac Julien, and others. At the same time, visual artists such as Stan Douglas, Ursula Biemann, Steve McQueen, Allan Sekula, and many others, have ventured into cinema. 16 On the topic of the documentary genre in the art world see Gludovatz (2004), Rehberg (2005), and Foster (2004). One recent example of how a different institutional frame affects a work might be with artist Allan Sekula and filmmaker Noël Burch’s recent essay film, The Forgotten Space (2011). Presented as “art,” it received a production budget of approximately 800,000 Euros – a figure not unusual for an art production but virtually unheard of for a documentary. 17 Of course, the 1980s also brought about radical changes in viewing practices with the advent of video recorders and later DVDs into the home. 18 Over four decades earlier, Armand Gatti conceived of a satirical play, V come Vietnam (1967), set on the West Coast involving a virtual war in Vietnam directed by a computer. 19 This topic is not new for Farocki, indeed, his film Leben BRD (How to Live in the FRG, 1990) consisted of a myriad of role-playing games in consumer society. 20 Farocki explains, “This has nothing to do with the fighting of war, rather, it is used to enhance a reality effect. It is the same as in a fictional film when secondary or X secondary scenes are inserted that have nothing to do with the narrative” (2011: 60, my translation). 21 Farocki uses this strategy in I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (2000) when he focuses on a prisoner in California captured on a surveillance tape examining a new quarter. The introduction of the new monetary piece signaled both the passage of time and the division between the outside vs. the inside world of the prison.

References Adorno, Theodor W. (1981–1982) Transparencies on Film [1966]. New German Critique, 24/25, 199–205. Adorno, Theodor W. (1984) Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. C. Lenhardt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Adorno, Theodor W. (1991) The Essay as Form [1954–1958]. In Tiedemann, Rolf (ed.) Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, pp. 3–23. New York: Columbia University Press. Alter, Nora M. (1996) Vietnam Protest Theatre: Staging the Television War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alter, Nora M. (1997a) Excessive Pre/Requisites: Vietnam through the East German Lens. Cultural Critique, 35, 39–79. Alter, Nora M. (1997b) … und … Fried … und …: Erich Fried’s Poetry and the Structure of Contemporaneity. Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, 21(1), 81–112. Alter, Nora M. (2002) Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Alter, Nora M. (2004) The Political In/visible in the Essay Film: Farocki’s Images of the World and Inscriptions of War. In Elsaesser, Thomas (ed.) Harun Farocki: Working on the

452

Nora M. Alter

Sight-Lines, pp. 211–236. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press; reprinted from New German Critique, 68 (1996), 165–192. Blümlinger, Christa (2009) Kino aus zweite Hand. Berlin: Vorwerk 8. Diederichsen, Diedrich (2009) Napalm Death. In Ehmann, Antje and Eshun, Kodwo (eds.) Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, pp. 51–56. Köln: König Books. Didi-Huberman, Georges (2009) How to Open Your Eyes. In Ehmann, Antje and Eshun, Kodwo (eds.) Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, pp. 38–50. Köln: König Books. Farocki, Harun (1975) Notwendige Abwechselung und Vielfahlt. Filmkritik, 224, 368–369. Farocki, Harun (2001a) A Cut, or Television-Maker’s Revenge [1989]. In Gaensheimer, Susanne and Schafhauser, Nicolaus (eds.) Harun Farocki: Nachdruck/Imprint Texte/ Writings, pp. 214–216. New York: Lukas & Sternberg. Farocki, Harun (2001b) Points and Topics [1990]. In Gaensheimer, Susanne and Schafhauser, Nicolaus (eds.) Harun Farocki: Nachdruck/Imprint Texte/Writings, pp. 222–224. New York: Lukas & Sternberg. Farocki, Harun (2001c) Risking His Life: Images of Holger Meins [1998]. In Gaensheimer, Susanne and Schafhauser, Nicolaus (eds.) Harun Farocki: Nachdruck/Imprint Texte/ Writings, pp. 268–291. New York: Lukas & Sternberg. Farocki, Harun (2004a) Dog from the Freeway [1982]. In Elsaesser, Thomas (ed.) Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, pp. 109–132. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Farocki, Harun (2004b) Making the World Superfluous: An Interview with Harun Farocki. In  Elsaesser, Thomas (ed.) Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, pp. 178–189. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Farocki, Harun (2004c) Nine Minutes in the Yard: A Conversation with Harun Farocki. In Elsaesser, Thomas (ed.) Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, pp. 297–314. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Farocki, Harun (2005) Jill Godmilow (and Harun Farocki). In MacDonald, Scott (ed.) A  Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Farocki, Harun (2009) Written Trailers. In Ehmann, Antje and Eshun, Kodwo (eds.) Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, pp. 220–241. Köln: König Books. Farocki, Harun (2011) Jeux sérieux. Trafic, 78, 55–63. Farocki, Harun (2012) Anaesthetising the Image: Immersion, Harun Farocki, interview with Kodwo Eshun. In Ten Brink, Joram and Oppenheimer, Joshua (eds.) Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence, pp. 67–79. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Farocki, Harun and Kaja Silverman (1993) To Love to Work and to Work to Love – A Conversation about Passion. Discourse 15(3), 57–75. Farocki, Harun and Kaja Silverman (1998) Speaking About Godard. New York: New York University Press. Foster, Hal (2004) An Archival Impulse. October, 110, 3–22. Gatti, Armand (1967) V come Vietnam. Paris: Seuil. Gludovatz, Karin (ed.) (2004) Auf den Spuren des Realen: Kunst und Dokumentarismus. Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung. Kittler, Friedrich (2010) Optical Media [2002], trans. Anthony Enns. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hohendahl, Peter (1997) The Scholar, the Intellectual, and the Essay: Weber Lukács, Adorno, and Postwar Germany. German Quarterly, 70(3), 217–232.



One, Two, Three Montages … Harun Farocki’s War Documentaries

453

Rehberg, Vivian (2005) The Documentary Impulse. Jong Holland, 21(4), 10–14. Solanas, Fernando and Getino, Octavio (1971) Towards a Third Cinema. Afterimage, 3, 16–35. Sontag, Susan (1968) Trip to Hanoi. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Virilio, Paul (1989) War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception [1984], trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Verso.

21

The Unwar Film Alisa Lebow

Images of war have always had an irresistible allure for the camera, be it for purposes of documentary or fiction. The drama, the emotion, the action easily translates the “theater” of war into the cinema of war. One advantage documentary has over fiction is the dimension of real-life risk to “actors” and filmmakers alike. Every war since the First World War has been accompanied by some form of documentary production, whether officially produced as pro-war propaganda, filmed professionally (or unprofessionally) by journalists and civilians, sometimes made in support of, sometimes in explicit opposition to, the war effort. Jane Gaines, in her essay in this volume (Chapter 19), asserts that the war documentary, since Vietnam, “has emerged as the anti-war documentary,” a contention that willfully overlooks the endless stream of expository documentary production that continues to clutter the programming schedules of the History Channel or Discovery’s Military Channel, made for war buffs of all generations. But what the comment registers, I think accurately, is that the anti-war documentary, oppositional as it may be, is nonetheless still a war documentary, deeply entangled in “counter-strategies of struggle and resistance,” in Elsaesser’s words (see Chapter 19). Think only of the take no prisoners rhetoric of filmmakers like Emile de Antonio or the Newsreel Collective, lobbing films like they were Molotov cocktails, as if filmic counter-attack could devastate its target as surely as the machinegun fire accompanying Newsreel’s logo. Consider the combative language from Newsreel collective member, Robert Kramer, as he expressed the desire for their films to “explode like grenades in people’s faces” (quoted in Renov, 2004: 12). Or de Antonio’s hope that his films would give viewers their history “right back in their face, like a napalm pie.”1 In the heyday of the anti-war documentary, the frame of militarism, even when cast as “anti-militarism,” was pervasive.2 This is not A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



The Unwar Film

455

Figure 21.1  The Day of the Sparrow (Philip Scheffner, Germany, 2010, produced by ARTE, Blinker Filmproduktion, Pong, Worklights Media, and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen).

at all to say that there is something wrong per se in pursuing these tactics, for as long as there is war and its cheerleader, the war documentary, one fiercely hopes the antiwar documentary will persist in its resistance. Certainly the militancy of the Vietnam-era anti-war films was backed by a firm political commitment and we might even be able to credit their collective effort with helping to turn the tide of public opinion, at least in the United States, against the war. But I contend ­nonetheless that we must not confuse anti-war documentaries with a renunciation of militarism per se, or the logic that subtends it.3 A new set of tendencies has arisen since the 1990s in this field of war documentary production that Gaines’s essay nods towards but will be further elaborated in this essay. While the pro- and anti-war documentaries are locked in a tense standoff, the one exuberantly priming the pump for any given war effort, the other taking the cinematic counter-offensive, two further forms have emerged: what I will call the “paramilitarist” war documentary and the “unwar” documentary. In this essay I will explore these two modes in further detail, the former as the latest addition to the militarist tradition, and the latter, which proleptically emerged earlier,4 as a laudable antidote to this trend. The “unwar” documentary, I will argue, works to undo the very logic that subtends the entire triumvirate of militarist documentary, whether pro-, anti-, or para-, which all operate within a direct sphere of “engagement” with militarism, never entirely outside of its bellicose imperatives.5 Of these two emergent forms, by far the more common and familiar is the paramilitarist documentary. With countless examples, the paramilitarist documentary updates the war genre by emphasizing the individual soldier above and beyond the larger conflict, utilizing the latest portable video technologies to give the viewer the impression of visceral proximity to the action. Films in this vein, Restrepo (Sebastian

456

Alisa Lebow

Junger and Tim Hetherington, US, 2010), Armadillo (Janus Metz Pedersen, Denmark, 2010), and the earlier Gunner Palace (Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, US, 2004) and Occupation: Dreamland (Ian Olds and Garrett Scott, US, 2005) constitute the latest incarnation of the subdued pro-war film,6 never fully declaring their sympathies, yet nonetheless providing tacit support to the war effort in their formal generic properties as well as their implied affinities. These ambivalent war films, neither explicitly pro- nor anti-, can be seen as contributing to the war effort the way a mercenary or unofficial force might be engaged illicitly to assist the dominant order, hence my assignation of the prefix “para.”

Paramilitarist War Docs and Genre7 The paramilitarist war documentary excels in the “war is hell” approach, in which the politics and historical contexts for war are understood as less significant than some generic humanism that sees war as a form of the sublime, in which everyone is living more authentically in the face of death or that everyone is dehumanized and made to suffer equally. They can be distinguished by a further set of identifiable characteristics: Generic adequation with the Hollywood war film; emphasis on the individual soldier’s plight; a gritty, though not unstylized, realist aesthetic heavily dependent on observational filming techniques; and an abiding, if disingenuous, political agnosticism. As noted somewhat breathlessly by critics, there is more than a family resemblance between the fictional war film and the recent spate of paramilitarist war documentaries, such as Restrepo and Armadillo. There is some irony in this, especially in the case of the Iraq War films, not least because their fictional counterparts with

Figure 21.2  Armadillo (Janus Metz Pedersen, Denmark, 2010, produced by Fridthjof Film).



The Unwar Film

457

a very few exceptions (notably Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker) have been deemed to be “box office poison” (Barker, 2011). Nonetheless, it may be said that this is a rare instance when documentaries have found commercial success where fiction films have failed. The films in question are hailed not only as great documentaries, but as great war films full stop: Time Out London reviewer, David Jenkins coos, “Restrepo brilliantly captures the dynamics of war”; Sukhdev Sandu, of the Telegraph calls it “an exercise in visceral intimacy”; while Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir calls Armadillo “a brilliant work of cinema, a non-fiction film as intense and visceral as any drama.”8 This is no accident, since these films have been “edited and scored like a feature,” as critic Mark Holcomb of the Village Voice astutely notes.9 They are convincing examples of the war genre in film, perhaps all the more so because of the real-life consequences that they purport to portray. These contemporary documentaries about the American and/or European engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan are distinct from war documentaries from previous eras. As New York Times film critic, A.O. Scott muses: Iraq and Afghanistan are hardly the first wars to be captured by documentary filmmakers, but a particular kind of documentary has arguably become the visual medium that defines those wars. The mobility enabled by the proliferation of inexpensive, lightweight digital cameras has brought the reality of combat – the noise, the tedium, the confusion – closer than ever. (Fortunes and Misfortunes of War, from a Danish Perspective, New York Times, April 14, 2011)

Interestingly Scott identifies the mobility enabled by technology, without remembering to indicate the distinct lack of independent mobility, proscribed specifically by the military policy requiring the “embedding” of journalists and filmmakers. I am certainly not the first to note that embedding does more than limit the freedom of movement of a filmmaker or journalist, inherently skewing the representation to the perspective from which it is captured, that of the (in this case, invading) army. Writing about journalists, but equally applicable to filmmakers, Judith Butler (2009: 64) says, “these reporters were offered access to the war only on the condition that their gaze remain restricted to the established parameters of designated action.” Films like Restrepo and Armadillo take the POV of individual soldiers platooned in foreign, unfathomable landscapes, in a geopolitical context they don’t even pretend to try to understand. Armadillo is the more stylized of the two, using special effects such as slow motion and time lapse, and relying on a particularly emotive electronic score for the intense battle scenes. Restrepo has a more stripped down, almost amateur quality to it, giving the film a gritty newsreel style of realism, yet interestingly both films have been equally touted for their realistic depiction of contemporary warfare. Heavily dependent upon observational filming techniques, these films are subject to the same weak political commitment evinced by the “vérité” films that long preceded them.10 While observational filmmaking can powerfully convey the “presence”

458

Alisa Lebow

of “being there,” so the criticism goes, it does so generally at the expense of deeper analysis or critique. It also tends to be read as an objective account, despite the editing-intensive requirements of such an approach. This technique always seems to convey a seductive immediacy, as if the films can expose us to the unmediated “raw emotion” of the experience of war. Whether related specifically to the observational filmic modality, genrefication, or some underlying political torpor, the lack of an articulated political position of these films has not gone entirely unnoticed, for instance by A.O. Scott in his review quoted above, when he says: “The films tend to be politically agnostic, neither condemning nor celebrating the American-led military missions in Western Asia and the Middle East, which may be an authentic reflection of public ambivalence.”11 Here we have documentary performing the role of ideological mirror, reflecting the general public sentiment rather than influencing it, as most of the Vietnam anti-war films intended to do. As Tzvetan Todorov (1990: 19) asserts, and this ties into the uses of genre within these films, “society chooses and codifies the acts that most closely correspond to its ideology.” The general claim that films like Restrepo and Armadillo have refrained from politics merely indicates their discursive reproduction of the dominant ideology, not their lack of political engagement, an assessment shared by Tony Grajeda (2007) in his thoughtful essay on contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan war documentaries. Grajeda does in part ascribe this political agnosticism to the emergence of generic elements in the films, when he states in his discussion of one of the more egregious examples of the contemporary ambivalent paramilitarist documentary, that: Gunner Palace has severed ties to the tradition of political documentaries, including In the Year of the Pig and Hearts and Minds, and instead has extended a different tradition of cinematic codes – that of the combat subgenre of the war movie.

He is referring to the film’s focus on the individual soldier, the development of “­emotional drama of embattled individual survival” in Pat Aufderheide’s words (1990). However, in addition to this, there are many more elements that bind films like this one to the war film genre, including focus on the heroic (if at times ­confused) soldier, a build up of tension leading to high pitched battle scenes, male bonding, a Manichean – if inchoate – division of “us” and “them,” and in aesthetic terms, driving music and fast-paced editing.12 It is for all of these reasons that film critics have found it nearly impossible to talk about these films without making comparisons to fictional depictions of war.13 Both in the promotional material for the films and in their critical reception, the positive affiliation with the fictional war film genre serves to emphasize the films’ great dramatic and representational success. To be sure there is a tacit condescension here, implying that documentaries are not usually this engaging, but I am certain that, for instance, Andrew O’Hehir writing for Salon.com meant Armadillo the greatest compliment when he called it “among the greatest war films ever made.”14 If I appear to have been overly concerned with the reception of paramilitarist war



The Unwar Film

459

documentaries, it has been largely in order to establish their extratextual generic codings, through which viewers were prompted to engage with these films. These reviews create a context in which the films can be viewed via well-worn habitual viewing practices of a genre film, and this is in part what makes these paramilitarist films pernicious. Genre, in film, describes a loose set of identifiable (iconic, narrative, structural) elements, not necessarily all present in any one instance, that mark a set of films as distinct from those of another genre. Yet there is a great deal of overlap amongst filmic genres, as well as certain aspects that join them all in a commonality, including a high degree of narrative predictability. While acknowledging that not all genres share the same degree of determinism, literary critic Gary Saul Morson asserts that some genres more than others leave limited room for improvisation, unpredictability, and contingency, displaying distinct elements of pre-ordination. In his words: “Different genres define various kinds of wholes, so at times it seems that genre is destiny” (Morson, 1998: 680). The war film, in both fiction and documentary, would be one of those genres where there is a particularly high degree of determination and thus, limited independence of form or content, impinging perceptibly on what Morson refers to as narrative “freedom.” Genre films of all types depend on the deep imprint of habitual viewing. They operate effectively in the arena of the known, the familiar, the already mastered narrative, with the greatest appeal presumably being the comforting combination of the predictable outcome with the nonetheless surprising twist. Genre films would have no allure at all if there were no surprises to be had, but nor would they succeed were they to forge entirely new territory in their overarching narrative. At their best, genre films reassure a viewer made anxious by the endless unknowability of the world, suggesting that some semblance of that same terrifying world can indeed be dominated, mastered, and known. In effect, they ­control and contain fear by retreading over the traumatic uncertainties of life in ever-manageable ways. War, that infernal “theater” of death and destruction that can only appear heroic in retrospect, is particularly susceptible to generic ­repetitions, for a few obvious reasons, most notably, the traumatic traces left on individual psyches as well as on larger collectivities (communities, nations), that are unmournable and thus subject to an eternal return. That the battlefield and its effects in these paramilitarist films is almost inevitably cast in heroic, even if ambivalent, terms only serves to reaffirm the stubborn unmournability of the events depicted, as this overly positive assertion attempts to hide, albeit in plain sight, a terrible burden of responsibility that, in order to be palatable, is masked by denial: denial of the troubled historicity of these wars, their extreme brutality and high civilian casualties, their flawed justifications, their undeclared yet undeniable ulterior motives, and thus the highly unstable moral ground upon which these invading armies stand. Habitual viewing is hardly perceptible when the very viewing habits in question are driven by adrenaline fueled pounding musical scores and flash-fast edits. But like a recurrent tic or an obsessive twitch, the proliferation of the paramilitarist war genre

460

Alisa Lebow

in contemporary American and European documentary can be read as a classical anxiety symptom formation, violently masking and neurotically attempting to forestall the altogether unassimilable panic, shame, and guilt induced by the very reference, via the mediated image, to war, let alone unjust war(s), waged in “our” name.

Interrupting Genre, Refusing Militarism: The Unwar Film In order to rupture the generic spell that binds us to these palliative paramilitarist images of contemporary warfare, we need to look to films that look awry, in the Žižekian sense of looking askance or even away from the main event, as it were, to that which is happening just outside the field of frenetic action. It is in this “minor” key,15 this sideshadowing just off-axis, that I want to turn to now in order to explore some of the representational possibilities available to us that may help to unravel the militarist frame binding these other films. I call these minor key films “unwar films,” in that they position themselves neither for nor against in sectarian terms, but instead do the destabilizing work of unthreading the very fabric of the militarist paradigm. Unwar films, by their non-generic nature, abhor predictability, and therefore no single unwar film resembles another. They do their work outside of habitual viewing states, demanding different dispositions of and various types of discerning engagement by the viewer, so that none can be said to align us into well-worn ruts of (im) perception. Nora Alter, in her impressive 1996 article on Harun Farocki’s Images of the World and Inscriptions of War, reminds us of Althusser’s suspicion not of the invisible within capitalist ideology, but of that which is seen but not perceived.

Figure 21.3  The Day of the Sparrow (Philip Scheffner, Germany, 2010, produced by ARTE, Blinker Filmproduktion, Pong, Worklights Media, and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen).



The Unwar Film

461

Discussing a specific film by Farocki but applicable to the films I call unwar films here as well, Alter proposes that there is a need to understand and interrogate their workings by being alert to “the political imperceptible” – that which would remain dangerously imperceptible until the artist reframes so that it may find its way to perception (Alter, 1996).16 We can read this practice through Rancière’s notion of “dissensus” as well, where the political work of these films is produced through what he calls the “redistribution of the sensible” (Rancière, 2004: 62).17 Whether the long painterly shots of bored soldiers on border patrol in Alexander Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices (1995) or the single-frame shots of the anticipated war’s end in Walid Raad’s Miraculous Beginnings, unwar films, like the Farocki film Alter describes, engage various techniques and approaches to make the imperceptible perceptible. To unpack this a little further, I am forging the designation “unwar” in the nexus of several intertwined theoretical influences, all of which, when taken together, work to destabilize the militarist-cinematic complex, and in their off-angle way, allow for an imaginary space that intervenes in the dominant militarist consensus. The “un” in “unwar” takes its meaning from three particular theoretical influences: the concept of “unfitting” elaborated by the literary critic Gary Saul Morson; the idea of “untimeliness” that we know from Nietzsche but which has been productively taken up by political theorist Wendy Brown; and Walter Benjamin’s much contested though nonetheless provocative concept of the “optical unconscious.” I will describe these influences in turn before discussing the ways in which they manifest in a specific set of unwar films. Gary Saul Morson proffers the term “unfitting” to designate that which, in a text, does not fit neatly into narratives of causality. “What is unfitting is not seen” (1998: 673), falling outside the usual purview of that which is see-able and that which fits the demands of the dominant narrative. He gives the example of the man who searches for his lost keys, not where he lost them, but under the streetlamp where he can see. The theory of unfitting presupposes that he searches for the keys in the dark where it may be harder to see, and is thus less predictable or neat in its resolution. I will explore this notion of “unfitting” in unwar films, those films that look to the side of the action, where the spotlight does not shine, “sideshadowing” (to use another term coined by Morson) its eventness. Morson argues for a space of distraction, of digression, even if necessary, abandoning the search for the key altogether and in the process discovering something more interesting. This is useful to me here, as it is not so much the key I am looking for in these unwar films, as the clues to what might constitute a passive resistance to the narrative drumbeat of war. The unwar film creates a more complex version of war, in which the soldier’s life becomes boring, understimulated, and filled with waiting, the film gazing intently just to the side of the main events. Unwar films look at the quotidian, the uneventful, the “something small nearby.”18 In these ways, the unwar film makes perceptible that which is otherwise repressed or simply overlooked in the galloping narratives of war, thus helping to create the conditions for an emergent “political dissensus.” It does so variably either by attending to war in its mundane uneventness, the aspects of war that neither make the history books, nor factor into its interpretation as geopolitical

462

Alisa Lebow

inevitability, or by looking outside of war’s theater entirely toward its undeclared and unpredictable effects. “Untimeliness” as a concept introduces the element of awkward or “inappropriate” temporality so central to the unwar film. Wendy Brown, in her essay “Untimeliness and Punctuality” (2005) notes that critical theorists are frequently lambasted for not attending to crises in politically efficacious ways, seeming to take positions that appear insensate to the political exigencies of the day. She argues ­passionately for the need to protect that space of critique even when it may appear irrelevant to, or disruptive of, the battles as they are waged on the ground. What she is defending is the space to imagine otherwise, to insist on “alternative possibilities and perspectives in a seemingly closed political and epistemological universe.” If we attribute the task of the critic to the filmmaker here, we can see how the unwar film, in its refusal to treat the topical matter of war directly, and its commitment to ethical principles of pacifism at the core, creates the space of imaging “alternative possibilities,” becoming, in Brown’s words, a “nonviolent mode of exploding the present” (2005: 14). The “unwar” films I have in mind, namely Walid Raad’s Miraculous Beginnings and I Only Wish That I Could Weep (2001–2002), Alexander Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices (Russia, 1993), and Philip Scheffner’s The Day of the Sparrow (Germany, 2010), can easily be seen as too “out of step” or “missing the moment” to launch a direct blow to the war. They are not topical in the way an anti-war or even a pro-war film might be. They do not attend to individual battles or events on the news, or if they do, as Scheffner does in The Day of the Sparrow, they focus on, in effect, the wrong story – a dead sparrow instead of a dead soldier. Yet in that displacement, the perversity of those confused priorities is only amplified, not denied. Further, the untimeliness of these films is their most powerful tool, disrupting the otherwise seamless and inuring volley of fire coming from all other war films, even the antiwar variety. We might even think of the question of “untimeliness” here quite literally, in the exceedingly slow temporality of a film like Alexander Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices or Walid Raad’s uncannily fast-paced Miraculous Beginnings, either of which can be said to reverse the adrenaline-pumped pacing of the para-militarist documentary. The pace in these films is literally “out of joint” with the more familiar viewing practices that sweep the viewer along with their narrative or argument. These films are untimely precisely in that they permit a “wildness beyond the immediate in order to reset the possibilities of the immediate” (Brown, 2005: 15) or again, in Rancière’s terms, create a “conflict between a sensory presentation and a way of making sense of it” (2011: 139). The third term that helps to shape and modify the “un” of unwar films is indebted to Rosalind Krauss’s revival of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “optical unconscious” – where photography and film’s unique contribution is in its framing of detail, its sustained focus on the minute, microscopic, unexceptional, that can (though significantly does not always) reveal more about the dynamics of culture than that which can be seen by the naked eye. This ascription of film’s “deepening apperception,” its generalized ability to “see more” and reveal the undercurrents – or



The Unwar Film

463

unconscious – not otherwise available to vision, does not entirely bear out in film generally. But if understood as an inherent potential of film, even if rarely attained, the concept remains intriguing. Krauss notes that Benjamin, in a footnote at the end of his essay (Benjamin, 1969: 251), specifically mentions war among the mass movements for which the mechanical apparatus of the camera is particularly sensate, and where “we encounter some form of ‘unconscious’ that the camera could intercept” (Krauss, 1993: 179). She goes on to differ with Benjamin, saying that even if the mass movements displayed in wartime could be analyzed in terms of an unconscious (something Freud also had in mind in his “Group Psychology” essay) it would not necessarily mean that the unconscious resided in the optics of the camera. In her words: If “gatherings of hundreds of thousands” are a face that the human sensorium simply cannot register, such gatherings … can indeed be thought to display a collective consciousness, leading to their analysis in terms of an unconscious. But the masses on the parade grounds at Nuremberg, though they may make patterns for the camera eye that can be organized within the optical field, are human masses, and if they have an unconscious, collective or not, it is a human unconscious, not an “optical” one. (1993: 179–180)

Krauss locates this unconscious optics not in the prosthetic mechanical camera eye but in the eye of the camera’s beholder, thus giving the unconscious back its humanity, as it were. I favor Krauss’s humanizing “angle” (in her words) on the optical unconscious, where the filmmaker, not the apparatus is thus imbued with the potential for a heightened unconscious (thus not intentional) optical perception. Art, or cinema, here functions much like the intermediary of the talking cure, enabling unconscious processes to enter the realm of the perceptible. I am taken by the idea that a certain way of looking – and even looking away – from war, made possible by film, can, if analyzed attentively, reveal something like an “unconscious optics” in the same way that psychoanalysis “made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception,” such as the slip of the tongue (Benjamin, 1969: 235). It is the films that approach the status of a “slip,” ones that create an inadvertent, seemingly incidental, visual representation, films that I am calling “unwar films,” that even in their inadvertence can reveal something akin to an optical unconscious of a given phenomenon, in this case: war. These unwar films go some way in this direction, exposing the unnoticed, the invisibles, the overlooked that war produces, rather than its “main attraction.” It is not that the films themselves are to be seen as unconscious errors, but that they represent, in effect, a “slip” in the general narrative of war and can, upon reflection, lead to its exposure. We now turn to some examples of the unwar film, beginning with two brief films by an artist whose work can be nominated “honorary” in the documentary field, despite its avowed fabrications.19 The New York-based Lebanese artist, Walid Raad, in his guise as The Atlas Group, made several films and works attributed to others,

464

Alisa Lebow

displacing authorship and highlighting questions of authenticity, while nonetheless going to the heart of the experience of war that requires no further authentication than that which strikes the viewer as appearing to be true. According to art critic Sarah Hotchkiss, Raad himself has apparently claimed that: The Atlas Group’s objects and stories cannot be categorized as fiction or nonfiction; they reject this distinction entirely. This stance allows for a simultaneous critique of the subject matter and the conventions through which historical material is presented as unadulterated fact.20

The first film I’ll discuss flits by the viewer in a blink of an eye, and the other, also accelerated in speed beyond what the eye can take in, seems somehow mired in a dream. Both films operate on the level of the unconscious. Miraculous Beginnings attributed to the “renowned” (fictional) Lebanese historian, Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, is a film comprised of hundreds of individual frames, each one exposed at the exact moment the good doctor thought the Lebanese Civil War (or “wars” as Raad has it) was over. As the legend, taken directly from the still functional Atlas Group website, goes: [F]rom 1975 until 1991, Dr. Fadl Fakhouri was in the habit of carrying two 8 mm film cameras wherever he went. With one camera he exposed a frame of film every time he thought the civil wars had come to an end. With the other camera he exposed a frame of film every time he came across the sign of a doctor or dentist’s office. Dr. Fakhouri titled the two rolls of film, Miraculous Beginnings and No, Illness Is Neither Here Nor There. (www.theatlasgroup.org)21

The endless unendurable disappointments a civilian would experience in the midst of seemingly interminable wars is conveyed literally in flashes of pathos, as mundane and arbitrary images flicker past in a blur that defies the brain’s ability to process. The imperceptible becomes nonetheless comprehensible as the viewer registers the fleeting yet vain hopes that fade faster than the eye can see. It is not the specific details of the images but instead the feeling of despair that registers as the random images flit by, giving a particularly poignant sense of the optical unconscious, conveyed as effectively as the subliminal advertising experiment allegedly conducted in a cinema in Fort Lee, New Jersey, that flashed a message 3/1000 of a second every five seconds telling viewers to eat popcorn and drink Coca Cola.22 I Only Wish That I Could Weep (2001–2002) consists of very different imagery – eight sped-up sequences of the sun setting into the sea – yet like Miraculous Beginnings, it communicates the longing to be elsewhere and for things to be ­otherwise than they are, attributed to another fictional character, one that we, along with Raad, would like to imagine could exist. “Operator #17,” who is supposed to be patrolling Beirut’s Corniche for the Lebanese intelligence service, scanning the famed promenade for enemy secret service operatives in the wake of the never



The Unwar Film

465

Figure 21.4  I Only Wish I Could Weep (The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Lebanon, 2001–2002).

convincingly ended civil war, instead of performing this infernal task, lets his camera lens linger indefinitely on impossibly picturesque Mediterranean sunsets. The camera, inexplicably recording in fast forward, captures his wayward wandering eye, taking it dreamily into the distance, away from the important security task at hand. Though Operator #17 never existed, Raad has explained that the fiction served to point up a reality of perception, where, “during and after the civil wars, people in Beirut really believed in the presence of Syrian secret agents on the Corniche” (Magagnoli, 2011: 313). The backdrop of war’s imminence, ready to re-ignite at any moment, presses everywhere outside Operator #17’s frame, but is nowhere to be found within it. Raad’s description of his/The Atlas Group’s work as being comprised of blurred images that are “never-on-time, always to the side” (Raad, 2002: 42)23 is particularly apt in describing this work both as untimely and unfitting, key aspects of the unwar film. In this case, Operator #17 is distracted, neither focused fully on the job at hand, nor on his daydreams. He catches the sunsets but misses the potential action, looking just to the side of what he’s supposed to be watching. This distracted agent is exhausted, fed up with meaningless orders, tired out from being on red alert for too many years, weary of fearing the enemy just around the bend, enervated from always expecting – and experiencing – the worst. He expresses his dissatisfaction in the defiant act of looking away, looking at the sunset when he’s supposed to be looking for danger lurking. Duty no longer calls; sublimity holds the stronger lure. This is the artist’s fantasy, of course, that a soldier/operative would answer a higher call than his military supervisor’s meaningless demands, but the fantasy is surely not an idle one. Operator #17, along with Raad, has his priorities straight. For this, we are told, he lost his job, but I’d like to imagine that he retained his ability to dream. The

466

Alisa Lebow

Figure 21.5  The uneventfulness of war, from Spiritual Voices (Alexander Sokurov, Russia, 1993).

sunsets are precisely “unfit” as the object of this operative’s gaze and “unfitting” into the narrative of war, intrigue, terror, that fills the frames of militarist war films. It is off topic and yet says so much about what is disallowed in the imagery and the imaginary of war. Alexander Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices: From the Diaries of War, his epic 327-minute, five-part, made-for-television documentary series24 about the Russian-inherited Soviet war with Afghanistan, goes even further in the direction of dreaming (day dreaming and otherwise), to exemplify the unwar documentary. The first episode, which lasts 38 minutes and is comprised of just two shots (the first lasting a full 30 minutes, of a wintry landscape in a fixed frame, the second much shorter and dissolved into toward the very end, of a sleeping soldier) is a most intriguing entry into a series made for television. It boldly declares its alterity first and foremost from television as we know it, but also from the war genre. In episode 1, the wind wails, the foggy mist rolls out then in again, the sun slowly sets and darkness enshrouds the scene, all in real time. We lose our visual and temporal bearings, and with them any prior expectations of what it is we are about to see. In this majestic long take, the viewer scans the frame, notices its parameters, its vectors, its simultaneous grandeur and mundanity. Jeremy Hicks suggests that Sokurov tricks us into “inattentive viewing, only later to show us we have missed something” (2011: 18). Amidst the wind and the intermittent seagull calls, the soundtrack bears music and a minimal voice-over (performed by Sokurov himself), telling us of the troubled life of Mozart. Arguably all this has nothing to do with war, except that Sokurov posits it as the sleeping soldier’s dream, thus imbuing the soldier with a rich spiritual life.25



The Unwar Film

467

While I cannot begin to describe to you the entire 327-minute film, I can suggest its general arc and point to certain telling scenes in order to convey that which makes this film a quintessential unwar film. It is not until episode 2, after the initial prologue, that we find ourselves shipping out, along with a battalion of soldiers of the Moscow Border Detachment, to the eleventh frontier post along the Tajik-Afghan border. The film’s three further episodes are all filmed on the front, living in the bunkers with the soldiers and accompanying them on their border patrol detail. This unwar film skirts the closest to its paramilitarist counterpart of any of the examples cited thus far. Arguably it is even “embedded,” with the skeleton film crew bivouacking with, and shooting largely from the POV of, the Russian soldiers. However, from Sokurov’s perspective, there is no glory, no heroism, neither his own nor the soldiers.26 He complains in his weary voice-over of fatigue in the climb “up and up” to the lookout posts. He imagines these young men to be desolate, wretched creatures, who “can’t have had much in the way of human happiness … Perhaps some of them don’t have anyone waiting for them anywhere.” This strikes quite a contrast to the usual image of “boys on the front” with their proverbial sweethearts in waiting, and serves well as one of many “unfitting” narrative details. The film’s pacing runs counter to the war film, inching its way, step by dusty, exhausted step toward the inevitable battle, given to us well after most viewers would have switched the channel or walked out of the room, sometime in the middle of episode 4, roughly 200 minutes into the film. Clearly, the main event is not the battle scene. The battle is an inevitability that somehow, eventually, must be shown, but its centrality is flatly denied. Instead, what is foregrounded is the waiting, watching. In episode after episode we witness the daily routine of soldiers eating, sleeping, reading, walking the long mine-laden path to and from the lookout post, languidly smoking cigarettes, chattering mindlessly, and then, more of the same. The color palette is similarly spare and redundant, a somber dusty brown with hints of green and shades of yellow, not colorless, but almost. The time of waiting, in which nothing of note happens suggests the paralyzing quality of war, its inertia rather than its “action”; another sign of the effects of “untimeliness” in this unwar film. In this inverted action film, “the plot of a war film is implied but not developed into an exciting staging of combat scenes” (Hänsgen, 2011: 45). Instead, time unfolds almost in the absence of narrative. Space too is defamiliarized. For instance, late in episode 3, a group of soldiers are perched on a hilltop, chatting in a medium shot that painstakingly pulls out to reveal the immensity of the setting. The sound, recorded separately from the camera, gives the impression of intimacy. We overhear their very quotidian, relaxed, conversation, interrupted at points by crashing thunder. The image reveals, slowly but surely, how isolated and insignificant these few men are in this imposing and dominating terrain, with flashes of lightning dramatically emphasizing their precariousness. It is not the men who are rugged, but their surroundings; they, in fact, are fragile and their task – to secure the immense borders – Sisyphean. To highlight the soldiers’ insignificance, Sokurov searches for metaphors, as in the brief scene where a tortoise is observed laboriously moving along a rock, crawling unsuspectingly under a propped up machinegun only to be clobbered by it with one misstep,

468

Alisa Lebow

Figure 21.6  The precariousness of the soldier’s position conveyed via framing, from Spiritual Voices (Alexander Sokurov, Russia, 1993).

prompting it to scurry off with uncharacteristic speed. The tortoise shell resembles nothing so much as a soldier’s helmet, its stupid unwitting presence in this mine-laden terrain an easy stand-in for these simple foot soldiers, whose one misstep could cost them their lives or limbs. This unlikely analogy – and it’s not the only instance of this in the film – between soldier and hapless creature completely eschews the heroic narratives demanded by the battlefield drama. The tortoise scene reveals an unconscious optics of war suggesting more about its absurdity than any dramatic battle scene ever could. Even at the height of the “confrontation” with a full 20 minutes of out and out warfare in episode 4, the film refuses to cede to the narrative demands of the genre. The camera cowers, the shots make no attempt to “capture the action,” the film pacing utterly refuses the temptation to match the rapid rate of machinegun rounds audible on the soundtrack. Sokurov’s voice-over explains: “War is hideous, from the very first shot to the last. There is nothing but dust, the smell of burning, stones, hot shrapnel, blood, a hint of fear. No room for aesthetics” (my italics). In an interview, quoted by Sabine Hänsgen, he illuminates his position: In war, there are no picturesque explosions, sensational time lapses, people who grab their heads. There are no blinding flashes, no blood that slowly runs down a finger. And actually, there is no excitement either. … Long breaks between the attacks, in which there is relaxation. A great amount of vacuous activity, erratic advances, long periods of looking around. (Hänsgen, 2011: 45–46).

Hänsgen rightly identifies Sokurov’s challenge to the audience, requiring of the spectators that they “change to perceive the liminal variability of the images. What we are dealing with here is an appeal to reshape the perceptual apparatus beyond the



The Unwar Film

469

comprehension of a narrative.” Precisely an “unwar” film as I’ve been attempting to put forth; using the cinematic apparatus as a means to reveal some crucial aspect of the optical unconscious of war while at the same time foregrounding that which would normally be excluded from the narrative, the “unfitting” details which here become the main story, the only thing, in fact, that is fit to behold. Its untimeliness, too, marks it out clearly as an unwar film. The final example of the unwar film that I will discuss is Philip Scheffner’s The Day of the Sparrow. This is another film that demands scrupulously attentive viewing, as it holds indefinitely on shots of bucolic landscapes where the stillness may eventually be interrupted by something revealing, but only if we are prepared to wait patiently for it to appear. Possibly the only documentary ever to be billed as a “political wildlife film,” (Wolf, 2010) it takes an exacting ornithologist’s gaze on contemporary geopolitics, making unexpected yet painfully astute observations connecting the fate of a single house sparrow to the slow and steady militarization of Germany and its understated yet active participation in the war in Afghanistan. The sparrow in question caused a minor furor in the news, when it was shot dead for knocking down 23,000 dominoes just days before the small Dutch city of Leeuwarden’s much celebrated annual Domino Day competition was to be broadcast across Europe and in the United States. The sparrow, we learn 30 minutes into this quietly disturbing film, was shot the same day as a German soldier was killed in a suicide attack in Kabul. The stories appeared, Scheffner tells us in his pitch-perfect narration, on the same page of a German newspaper, reported on November 15, 2005. Nothing more is said of this coincidence, upon which the entire premise of the film rests: As Europe concerns  itself with the untimely death of a common house sparrow (and the event

Figure 21.7  Palimpsest over the River Mosel in Germany, from The Day of the Sparrow (Philip Scheffner, Germany, 2010, produced by ARTE, Blinker Filmproduktion, Pong, Worklights Media, and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen).

470

Alisa Lebow

became a matter of Dutch national security), it turns away from the infinitely more scandalous fact of its participation in a deadly war far from home. Scheffner brings that war home, not by showing us patriotic mothers who’ve lost their sons in battle, like Michael Moore, but by resolutely revealing, subtly yet inexorably, how Germany has quietly become remilitarized. He does this by filming birds, birds in their natural surroundings deep in the heartland of Germany, and always within telephoto range of some well-camouflaged local military base. In this film that attunes us to the drift and glide of a bird of prey or the coordinated movements of a flock of geese in flight, the closest we get to the war are images of Tornado fighter jets emerging literally out of thin air, unexpectedly disturbing the peace of the otherwise tranquil German countryside. These same jets we are told by an unnamed interviewee, conduct practice runs along the winding River Mosel in Western Germany, whose valleys provide a useful testing ground for landing maneuvers in Afghanistan. The overlay of that information as we contemplate an aerial view of a most placid riverscape has the effect of an unsettling palimpsest, as if the geography of the war in Afghanistan had just settled like a transparent film over this sedate and otherwise soothing scene. This is also a question of untimeliness, again, time out of joint, as parallel narratives of wartime and peacetime are forced into the same chronotope of the shared frame. The filmmaker holds the shot well after the voice disappears, leaving only what seem to be the distinctive bird calls of the area on the audio track. Then an abrupt cut to a flock of birds fluidly moving in formation against a grey blue sky as the audio track continues insistently, unnaturally consistent, alerting us to the fact that the sound is actually electronic, a simulation of a bird call emanating from the airbase to discourage the feathered flyers from sharing the airspace of the about-to-be deployed jets. The patiently revealing images, taken with the unerring eye of an experienced birdwatcher, never fail to disturb as they brush uncomfortably up against the submerged realities of the increasingly militarized terrain. This film, with its unfitting side narratives of birds in flight, its unconscious optics (and acoustics) where things are often not what they seem, and its untimely – out of step – pacing that requires the patience of a twitcher, has all of the hallmarks of an unwar film, forcing a new perception of the sensible. As Nicole Wolf ’s review suggests: If … in the age of constant media confrontation with conflict zones we have lost our capacity for empathy because we have no relationship to the object of attention, then the Day of the Sparrow is a calm, insistent example of how documentary film, at any rate a particular documentary film, is precisely what can grow beyond the description of the world as we are able to see it today. If in the act of viewing the film produces the experience of a corporeal alienation effect in relation to familiar landscapes and confuses our embedding in certain pictorial, auditory and sensual contexts, then this carries the fascinating potential of the politics of aesthetics that might be the condition of political thought and action.

What Wolf alludes to here is the need to recalibrate our sensibility to imagine that which may be. What is at stake in the unwar film is the future imaginary, beyond the



The Unwar Film

471

logic that binds us to militarism as a necessary condition of political thought. I share Rancière’s “dream of an art that would transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations” (2004: 63). And in the realm of war documentaries, it is the unwar film that shows us the dream does occasionally come to pass; “ensuring, at one and the same time the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification” (Rancière, 2004: 63, my emphasis). So the final “un” in the unwar film, is the uncanny, sending a shock – also in the Benjaminian sense – through the field of the sensible, that may just, if we are attentive to the unconscious optics, and allow ourselves to be taken off course by the unfitting details and untimely interventions, help us to recast our thinking about war in our times. The contemporary war documentary appears most frequently in the paramilitarist vein, replacing the clearly pro-war documentary with a more ambivalent sentiment that nonetheless – and sometimes even appearing to be at odds with itself – stokes the flames of war. While there are some examples of anti-war films in the recent era, those seem to have lost their passion for the fight, tending to make economistic arguments or emotional pleas, both of which have had muted effects at best. The films that are truly anti-militarist, aesthetically and ideologically, and that arguably have the ability to haunt the discourse and unsettle the war documentary’s militarist paradigm, are the unlikeliest of films, the ones following the path that is the filmic equivalent of passive resistance. These are the unwar films.

Notes 1 De Antonio quoted in Joseph Morgenstern, History Right in the Face, Newsweek, November 10, 1969, 108–110. 2 It must be said that the use of the term “anti-militarist” here as a designation of the antiwar film, is not to be confused with anti-militarism as a political movement per se. Antimilitarism as a political movement decidedly refuses the logic of militarism using tactics such as non-payment of taxes, non-participatory sabotage, boycotting implicated companies, and of course conscientious objection. In fact as we shall see, the anti-militarist movement is closer in its affinities to what I have termed the unwar film than it is to the anti-war documentary. 3 To be very clear, I do not mean to claim here that no anti-war films have emerged in this post-9/11 period. That would be patently absurd, given the unparalleled success of films such as Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, US, 2004) and Iraq for Sale (Robert Greenwald and Kerry Candaele, US, 2006). An indicative list of anti-war documentaries of this  period would also include: Why We Fight (Eugene Jarecki, US, 2006), Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War (Robert Greenwald, US, 2004), and Baghdad ER (Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill, US, 2006). There is also Deep Dish TV’s 12-episode series Shocking and Awful (2004–2005) among many others. 4 An early incarnation of the “unwar” film would be Harun Farocki’s Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges / Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988), discussed by Nora Alter in Chapter 20.

472

Alisa Lebow

5 I would like to thank Sophie Mayer for helping to formulate this triumvirate of pro-, anti-, and para-militarist documentary. 6 Earlier incarnations of the paramilitarist film emerged during the time of the Vietnam War, where the most effective filmic strategy in tacit support of the war would be that of the soldier’s point of view purporting to be apolitical and objective, simply showing life in the trenches, when an attack can come at any time. This includes films like The Anderson Platoon (Pierre Schoendoerffer, 1967) and The Face of War (Eugene Jones, 1968). 7 Documentary in the twenty-first century found the recipe for success by following the formulas of fictional genre films. Man on Wire (heist genre) won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2009, In the Shadow of the Moon (sci-fi genre), won the Sundance Festival World Cinema Audience Award in 2007, and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (courtroom genre) was nominated for an Academy Award in 2011, to name just a few. In the war genre, we should note that Restrepo was nominated for an Academy Award in 2010, and Armadillo won the Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize the same year. 8 Time Out London, 2094, October 7–13, 2010; The Telegraph, October 7, 2010; Salon.com, April 15, 2011, http://www.salon.com/2011/04/15/armadillo/, accessed August 5, 2014. 9 Mark Holcomb, Village Voice, April 13, 2011, http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-04-13/ film/at-war-with-the-danes-and-on-the-frontline-in-armadillo/, accessed August 5, 2014. 10 Thomas Waugh (1976) claimed that, “The pseudo-objective cinema vérité of the sixties was ultimately bypassed by this cinema of open commitment, research, and analysis.” In this impressive essay, Waugh lays bare the limitations of the observational mode with regard to politically committed documentary. 11 Sukhdev Sandu, The Telegraph, October 7, 2010, goes even further: “Restrepo isn’t an obviously political film. The whys and wherefores of the US presence aren’t discussed. The directors prefer to focus on the adrenaline and buzz of armed battle.” 12 The one element usually missing in the war documentary that is ever-present in its fictional counterpart is blood and guts. Rarely is any blood shown or spilt in the contemporary documentary war film of any description (though there are, of course, exceptions, such as Olly Lambert’s Battle Hospital (UK, 2003), or Jon Alpert’s Baghdad ER (US, 2006). Armadillo does actually include a scene, quite late in the film, that depicts the consequences of a body being hit by a grenade. This subject deserves an essay unto itself. 13 In particular, references to Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 blockbuster war film, The Hurt Locker, abound. A few examples: David Jenkins, Time Out London, 2094, October 7–13, 2010, “With ‘The Hurt Locker’, Kathryn Bigelow claimed that war was the adrenalin junkie’s prescription of choice. Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s harrowing frontline doc ‘Restrepo’ shows how on the money Bigelow was.” Andrew O’Hehir, Salon. com, “Junger and Hetherington take our conflicted ideas about war and its let’s-make-aman-out-of-you purpose and throw them in our faces, in a way ‘Hurt Locker’ never does.” Mark Dinning, Empire Magazine, “Powerful, terrifying and soulful, this real-life Hurt Locker is an intimate, often brilliant insight into combat and comradeship,” http:// www.empireonline.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?FID=136974, accessed August 5, 2014. Sukhdev Sandu, The Telegraph, October 7, 2010, about Restrepo: “Anyone who thrilled to the rawness of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker will get a kick out of this documentary.” 14 Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com, April 15, 2011.



The Unwar Film

473

15 I have in mind something along the lines of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) theory of a “minor literature” that unsettles the dominant language by virtue of its deterritorial – or “outsider” – nature. 16 One could easily include several of Farocki’s films under the rubric of unwar films. If I have refrained from analyzing them here, it is only because he is duly represented in this volume in Nora Alter’s contribution (Chapter 20). 17 See also Rancière (2009: 25) and Rancière (2011). 18 In a 1979 interview Chantal Akerman described her method thus: “Instead of showing a ‘public’ event because it is so sensational, or full of lots of things, I will tell the story of something small nearby” (Bergstrom, 1999: 94, my emphasis). 19 Here I follow a move by Gaines, who nominates Godard’s Letter to Jane as an honorary documentary, and she in turn follows Bill Nichols who does the same with Eisenstein’s Strike (Gaines, 2007: 8). 20 Sarah Hotchkiss, Profile: Walid Raad, Art Practical, November 2, 2011, http://www. artpractical.com/column/walid_raad/, accessed August 5, 2014. 21 Miraculous Beginnings is viewable on this site at http://www.theatlasgroup.org/data/ TypeA.html, accessed August 9, 2014. 22 Whether or not this campaign ever actually took place is a matter of some dispute, see Carrie McLaren (2004) and Philip Merikle (2000). 23 Raad was actually referring to a different project, entitled “Sweet Talk: Photographic Documents of Beirut,” but the description fits these projects equally well. 24 Though Sokurov is best known for his feature filmmaking, he has made many more documentaries than fiction films. See Hicks (2011). 25 Of course we are never told this in so many words, but the technique of dissolving from the musings upon creative works of art to the image of a sleeping soldier is reproduced again in episode 3 of this series and more significantly still, the same device is used in the short film A Soldier’s Dream (1995). That film is comprised of the very same footage of sleeping soldiers that appears in Spiritual Voices intercut with (among other things) the mournful painting from 1903 by Finnish Symbolist, Hugo Simberg, The Wounded Angel. 26 The heroism of the filmmaker who fearlessly goes into the live war zone to bring us images from the front is a frequent theme in reviews of war documentaries.

References Alter, Nora (1996) The Political Im/perceptible in the Essay Film: Farocki’s Images of the World and Inscriptions of War. New German Critique, 68, special issue on Literature, 165–192. Aufderheide, Patricia (1990) Good Soldiers. In Miller, Mark Crispin (ed.) Seeing Through Movies. New York: Pantheon. Barker, Martin (2011) A “Toxic Genre”: Iraq War Films. London: Pluto Press. Bergstrom, Janet (1999) Invented Memories. In Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey (ed.) Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman. Wiltshire, UK: Flicks Books. Benjamin, Walter (1969) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [1936]. In Arendt, Hannah (ed.) Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. Brown, Wendy (2005) Untimeliness and Punctuality. In Brown, Edgework, pp. 1–16. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

474

Alisa Lebow

Butler, Judith (2009) Frames of War. London: Verso. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gaines, Jane (2007) The Production of Outrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 48(2), 36–55. Grajeda, Tony (2007) The Winning and Losing of Hearts and Minds: Vietnam, Iraq, and the Claims of the War Documentary. Jump Cut, 49, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/ jc49.2007/Grajeda/index.html, accessed August 5, 2014. Hänsgen, Sabine (2011) Sokurov’s Cinematic Minimalism. In Beumers, Brigit and Condee, Nancy (eds.) The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov, pp. 43–56. London: I.B. Tauris. Hicks, Jeremy (2011) Sokurov’s Documentaries. In Beumers, Brigit and Condee, Nancy (eds.) The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov, pp. 13–27. London: I.B. Tauris. Krauss, Rosalind (1993) The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McLaren, Carrie (2004) Subliminal Seduction. Stay Free!, 22, http://www.stayfreemagazine. org/archives/22/subliminal-advertising.html, accessed August 5, 2014. Magagnoli, Paolo (2011) A Method in Madness: Historical Truth in Walid Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes. Third Text, 25(3), 311–324. Merikle, Philip (2000) Subliminal Perception. In Kazdin, A.E. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Psychology, vol. 7, pp. 497–499. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Available at http://watarts.uwater loo.ca/~pmerikle/papers/SubliminalPerception.html, accessed August 5, 2014.) Morson, Gary Saul (1998) Contingency and Freedom, Prosaics and Process. New Literary History, 29(4), 673–686. Raad, Walid (2002) Interview with Alan Gilbert. Bomb, 81, http://bombsite.com/issues/81/ articles/2504, accessed August 5, 2014. Rancière, Jacques (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics. New York: Continuum. Rancière, Jacques (2009) Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rancière, Jacques (2011) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. New York: Continuum. Renov, Michael (2004) Subject of the Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Todorov, Tzvetan (1990) Genres in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waugh, Thomas (1976) Beyond Verité: Emile de Antonio and the New Documentary of the 1970s. Jump Cut, 10–11, 33–39, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC1011folder/EmileDeAntonio.html, accessed August 5, 2014. Wolf, Nicole (2010) Of Bird Watchers and Other Incidental Proceedings. Catalogue of the 40th International Forum of New Cinema, Berlinale. http://dertagdesspatzen.de/en/3/ film-texts/forum-cataloguereview-0, accessed August 5, 2014.

Part VIII

Torture

Introduction Torture

Alisa Lebow

Despite Victor Hugo’s famous declaration of 1874 that “torture has ceased to exist” (quoted in Chapter 22 by de Sousa Dias in this section), torture persists well into the twenty-first century with no signs of abating. For a time, in certain cultures, it may have gone underground, but it never went away. In this book on contemporary documentary, which is divided neatly into themes, torture makes for an odd fit, as it is neither a particularly contemporary phenomenon nor is it a “theme” per se. Torture is a punitive and/or revelatory practice that has been with us throughout the ages, neither outside of civilization nor divisible from it although often made invisible to it. There is no culture to which it is entirely foreign and no place on earth where it has not been visited upon bodies, whether by an overlording state or an unaligned or unhinged individual. To say that torture has always existed in every civilization in every era is not to attempt to normalize or embrace it as an inevitability. It is simply to recognize that despite its periods of invisibility and inarticulability, it doesn’t ever disappear. Depending on the era and the arena in which it occurs, it may be more or less acknowledged, more or less embraced, more or less public in its expression, but whether acknowledged or denied, it never actually ceases to be. Torture is a practice available to us all. We are all potential (if not actual) torturers. We are also all vulnerable to it, though clearly depending on our access to forms of power and privilege, some more so than others. My temptation as editor of this section was to include one essay on a film about non-state torture (“family dynamics” comes to mind) or even voluntary torture (some S + M practices, for instance, but would we call it torture then?) or the shared roots of the terms “torture” and queer” from the Latin torquere. But instead I ended up choosing to focus on films that highlight the dynamics of state sponsored torture as they pertain to the body, to visibility, A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

478

Alisa Lebow

to knowledge, and to power. I chose this path because it is as a mechanism of state control that torture is most deliberately and methodically deployed and where it is at its most intractable and pernicious. It is thus in this capacity that it deserves to be analyzed and unpicked so as to better understand its operations. The body in question with regard to torture is a contradictory symbol of both submission and resistance. It is simultaneously frail and durable, vulnerable yet not necessarily or in every case breakable. In film we cannot touch the tortured body, we cannot smell the wretchedness of its surroundings, nor can we feel its pain. Indeed, in documentary film, we rarely even hear or see torture taking place. It may even be said to be one of documentary film’s undeclared taboos.1 Bodies in pain inflicted at the hands of interrogators, images and sounds so familiar to us from fiction films and television series, are generally absent from the documentary.2 What we might see in documentary is the body before or after it has been tortured, and the ­documentary spectator is left to decipher its traces. Torture is, of course, only in part a physical practice. It is intended as much to prey upon the psychology of the victim, and it is in this psychological register where its effects are most enduring and best communicated in the documentary. It may not be the words spoken that tell of the effects of torture, but of the surplus signs that can be read on the face or sensed in the cadence of the spoken word. Think only of the incessant twitch on the face of Yehuda Lerner, a survivor of the Sobibor death camp, in Claude Lanzmann’s Sobibor: October 14, 1943, 4 pm (2001). Some filmmakers, such as Susana de Sousa Dias in her impressive film 48 (2009), discussed in her chapter here, find torture’s resonances not in the visible per se, but in the affective audible, that which can be heard between and around the words of the ex-prisoners’ testimony. The fact that torture tends to be hidden or that its visible effects usually fade, does not mean that it can never be seen, or that we have no documentary films which attempt to portray it. The unwritten taboo has been broken, most recently in several documentaries that focus on the post-9/11 “black sites,” such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, that more straightforwardly resort to images (in the form of photographs and sometimes drawings) of torture. Though what those photographs and drawings tell us about the tortured body is surprisingly limited, in part because the tortured body is rarely the foregrounded image either in the photographs themselves or in the films made about them. There have been films that re-enact the torture scene, such as Peter Watkins’s Punishment Park (1971) or more recently Coco Fusco’s Operation Atropos (2005, discussed by Gómez-Barris in Chapter 24). These films seem to want to penetrate the dynamics that can make a torturer out of a human being. What are the conditions? What does it take? Is it just a matter of training? In the best-known films about post-9/11 torture at the hands of American soldiers, it is noteworthy (and duly noted by Nath in Chapter 25) that the tortured body, the victim of the flagrant abuses of power, tends to be sidelined in favor of focusing on the perpetrators. These perpetrators, whether understood (poorly) as “a few bad apples” or better positioned as functionaries of a rotten system, are the main concern of these documentaries, ultimately interrogating their psychology and/or role as victims of a twisted system.

Introduction 479 In the groundbreaking S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (Rithy Panh, 2003) Panh famously puts former Khmer Rouge prison guards through their daily paces in the same physical space in which they had performed their nefarious deeds decades before – the notorious S-21 prison where only seven of the nearly 14,000 prisoners left the building alive. This physical pantomime that resurrects a somatic memory in full psychological detail, puts the guards, rather than the prisoners, in the position of being tortured by memory.3 The reversal this enacts goes some way to exact a punishment upon these otherwise implacable characters, yet it by no means expiates their crime. Still, in contrast to verbal confession, which tends to invite a sympathetic reception, the physical re-enactment has a power to indict more convincingly. And after all, with the question of torture, one wants to believe there are guilty and innocent parties. Panh has the torturers encounter their victims in this moving film, and when one of the guards insists that he was a child when he was recruited and had no choice but to perpetuate these crimes or die, one of the very few survivors of that death prison asks him, in essence, if you are a victim, where does that leave me? This haunting question deserves to be asked of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo perpetrators as well, and it helps begin to unravel the contorted logic that allows for otherwise decent people to justify their own acts of cruelty. There is the implied suggestion here that identifying as victim has some real liabilities, with the potential to lead to remorseless cruelty just as it more obviously can lead to (perhaps justified) self-pity. A film such as La Flaca Alejandra (1994), discussed in this section by GómezBarris, further disturbs binaries of good and evil, victim and perpetrator in important ways. Made by a survivor of the Pinochet reign of terror in post-Allende Chile, about another survivor and comrade who became known as a turncoat informant, this film is extraordinary in clearly demonstrating that in such circumstances, given enough electroshocks and mind-altering drugs, deprived of enough sleep, it is impossible to know what any of us would do. Director Carmen Castillo is braver than most, willing to overcome her own personal antipathy toward a woman whom she had every right to hate, in order to make a film about the distorting effects of the entire unjust system. The protagonist, known as La Flaca Alejandra, was once Castillo’s comrade only to become the person indirectly responsible for the murder of Castillo’s then boyfriend, a well-known leader of the leftist movement. Women’s role in torture, both on the receiving and on the administering end, is one crucial node that Gómez-Barris explores, making clear that women’s participation only affirms the coercive force of patriarchy, doing nothing to dismantle it. The perpetrator of torture or murder is a figure that had been relegated to a minor role in documentaries of years past. There were of course films that featured him (Idi Amin Dada, Barbet Schroeder, 1974; Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, 1985; The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls, 1969), but these were rare and even in these, aside from the first one, the torturer and his deeds were not the main focus. Claude Lanzmann always took an aggressive stance toward any perpetrators he could snare in his crosshairs, as if avenging the Jews of Nazi crimes with the weapon of cinema. But for the

480

Alisa Lebow

most part documentary, including Lanzmann’s, has focused on the victim, as Brian Winston argued long ago (1988). However, with films such as S-21, El Sicario: Room 164 (Gianfranco Rosi, 2010), No Man’s Land (Salome Lomas, 2011), Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell (Panh, 2011, discussed here by Deirdre Boyle in Chapter 23), and, most notoriously, The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer et al., 2012),4 we find what might be called a new “perpetrator cinema,” where the torturer (or assassin, or mastermind of genocide) has come to occupy center stage and this in turn demands something new from the spectator. If the documentary spectator is conditioned to identify with the subject of the film, if we are endlessly asked to sympathize with the plight of others, even to the point of inuring us to feeling anything more than distant and ineffectual pity, what do films about sadistic prison guards, paramilitary death squad leaders, narco-traficante assassins, or mercenary secret agents licensed to kill, hope for us to see, understand, feel? How do they expect us to cathect, or do they? These films, some of which are discussed here, are certainly relevant to this theme, taking documentary in new directions that present not only spectatorial challenges but ethical ones as well. Torture, whether in post-9/11 America and its militarized outposts, in Latin America (especially Chile and Argentina), in Europe (in particular, Portugal under Salazar), or in the anti-communist as well as communist drives in the far east (specifically in Indonesia and Cambodia), has been the subject of powerful contemporary documentary filmmaking. I highlight the question of region here, as it is crucial to emphasize that torture is not located in, relegated to, or tolerated by any one particular place, but is practiced by all states, regardless of their public position or rhetorical relation to it. Questions about representational strategies and taboos, archaeologies of memory, performativity, and of course, Foucauldian notions of  hegemony and biopolitical power are all explored in this section, as are the aesthetic regimes mobilized in contemporary documentaries to treat this elusive yet pervasive practice.

Notes 1 To be sure it is a taboo that has been broken on occasion, notably in the spate of films that came out after the Abu Ghraib photographs were released, with films like The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (Rory Kennedy, 2007) and Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008). 2 Representation of torture has apparently risen dramatically on US television and film screens since 9/11. See Alfred McCoy (2012: 126). 3 For a truly revelatory discussion of this film, see Deirdre Boyle (2009; 2010). 4 The list could go on to include a spate of Israeli films such as Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), Z32 (Avi Mograbi, 2008), To See If I’m Smiling (Tamar Yarom, 2007), as well as several of the post-9/11 films including Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007), The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, and Standard Operating Procedure. For discussions about Israeli perpetrator documentaries, see Raya Morag (2012) and Livia Alexander (2012). Morag also has a monograph on the subject, Waltzing with Bashir (2013).

Introduction 481

References Alexander, L. (2012) Confessing Without Regret. In Flynn, M. and Salek, F. (eds.) Screening Torture: Media Representations of State Terror and Political Domination, pp. 191–216. New York: Columbia University Press. Boyle, D. (2009) Shattering Silence: Traumatic Memory and Reenactment in Rithy Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 50(1/2), 95–106. Boyle, D. (2010) Trauma, Memory, Documentary: Re-enactment in Two Films by Rithy Panh (Cambodia) and Garin Nugroho (Indonesia). In Sarkar, Bhaskar and Walker, Janet (eds.) Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering, pp. 155–172. New York: Routledge. McCoy, A. (2012) Beyond Susan Sontag: The Seduction of Psychological Torture. In Flynn, M. and Salek, F. (eds.) Screening Torture: Media Representations of State Terror and Political Domination, pp. 109–142. New York: Columbia University Press. Morag, R. (2012) Perpetrator Trauma and Current Israeli Documentary Cinema. Camera Obscura, 27(2), 93–133. Morag, R. (2013) Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Winston, B. (1988) The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary. In Rosenthal, Alan (ed.) New Challenges for Documentary. Berkeley: University of California Press.

22

(In)visible Evidence

The Representability of Torture Susana de Sousa Dias

What is the political intention of punishments? To terrify and be an example to others. Is this intention answered by thus privately torturing the guilty and the innocent? Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (1764) I first met Conceição Matos in 2003 because I needed to obtain permission to film a photograph from the police records preserved at the Portuguese political police (PIDE/DGS) archives.1 The image was to be part of a project I was then preparing, titled Natureza Morta (Still Life, 2005), a film without any words, entirely based on archival images dating from the time of the Portuguese dictatorship (1926–1974). Conceição was one of many people, erstwhile prisoners, with whom I had to speak, since the archive management had decided to apply the right of image to the police photos of political prisoners, thus reducing them to the mere function of a portrait, obfuscating their real condition of being a political corpus and of belonging to the realm of the res publica.2 During our meeting, the conversation turned to her photograph, of which she had brought a copy: “Did you notice that my hair is mussed? And you can even see hair growing on my upper lip.” The reason for this, she explained, was because the photograph had been taken only 17 days after she was imprisoned. Describing what it had been like during those days in solitary confinement, Conceição, at one point, stated that the clothes she was wearing at the time the photograph was taken, a light pullover and a dark shirt, were the same clothes with which a floor covered with her excrement was cleaned during the time of her torture. Suddenly the image took on a whole new meaning. It was no longer a photograph of a woman captured during a moment in the past but was instead a complex object impregnated with time, which provided a glimpse of the knowledge it A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



(In)visible Evidence

483

contained within it. It was that moment that gave rise to an idea which would culminate in the production of another film, 48, six years later. The idea crystallized around an apparently simple device: to exhibit just these photographs accompanied by the testimonies of the erstwhile prisoners. This device was based on a certainty: that it was possible to tell a history of the regime just through these images and the voices of the people in the photographs. But there were many uncertainties too. How could one make a film based just on still images? How could words and silences be balanced so that the image was not completely overwhelmed by the text? How should the narrative be structured? Should the faces of the interlocutors today be shown? When I decided, while the filming was in full swing, that one of the main themes of the film would be the torture, other questions then arose: how could the experience of the violence of the methods used by the political police be transmitted? How could one manage the disconnect between the moment the event happened and the experience endured to present times? How could one represent the pain? These latter questions are part of the vast theme of the representability of torture and its re-presentation through documentary. How can an equivalent of torture be provided through images, sounds, and words? How can one go beyond the semantic nature of the testimonial words and the visual representation of the actions or the consequences of the act of torture? These questions are not just merely rhetorical nor are they as elementary as they might seem at first glance. They refer to the question of the limits of the figuration of violence and the relationships between two representational registers, words and images, corroborating different forms of certification: testimonies and proof. Since torture is prohibited, the greater its invisibility the more important its attestation. This is the reason why the body is a privileged site for obtaining proof and why methods were scientifically developed with a view to achieving what is known as “white torture” – torture which does not leave visible physical traces. In a context of blanks, lacunae, and non-sayings, in the absence of bodies of evidence, how can the dimension of the violence wrought by the state be revealed? There are no photographs which directly document the torture practiced by the political police in Portugal. There are no official documents pertaining to this torture. No order has ever been found in any text directing the cruelty inflicted on political prisoners. The police were careful to never mention the torture in writing, leaving no documentary traces which could prove their actions. Yet another problem persisted, part of the vaster theme of the dialectics between history and memory. As Enzo Traverso affirms, “There are official memories, nurtured by institutions, i.e. states, and underground memories, hidden or forbidden. The ‘visibility’ and recognition of a memory also depend on the strength of those who possess this memory. In other words, there are ‘strong memories and ‘weak memories’” (Traverso, 2005: 72). The fact that Portuguese political prisoners were not instituted as historical subjects implies that their memory gradually faded with the passage of time after the regime fell. Their absence from the arena of collective memory is clearly illustrated by the fact that one of the main symbols of political oppression, the headquarters of

484

Susana de Sousa Dias

the political police where so many people were tortured during the dictatorship, was transformed into luxury condominium apartments a few years ago. Just two years after the Carnation Revolution in April 1974, the Portuguese philosopher Eduardo Lourenço highlighted the fact that, instead of having transformed the trauma of a dictatorship into a fecund memory, what happened was a fabulous psychic repression which exorcized the past (Lourenço, 1976). So how could one confer form, value, and meaning to these events and their constitutive invisibility?

Torture’s Re-emergence In order to understand how torture is treated in documentary it is important to observe its relationship with the evolution of the concept and developments on the ground, especially after the onset of the policy of a “global war on terror” implemented by the Bush administration. In this context, two aspects merit examination: the relationship between torture and the law and the shift of the notions of torturer and victim. When, in 1848, Victor Hugo exclaimed “le XVIIIe siècle, c’est là une partie de sa gloire, a aboli la torture” (Hugo, 1848), in truth he was describing a phenomenon which began at the height of the Enlightenment in European countries: the systematic suppression, by means of specific legislation, of torture as a judicial and penal instrument. In other words, the abolition of legal torture.3 The great penal reform which took place in Europe and the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries not only outlawed torture but also resulted in the progressive abandonment of exhibitions of racked bodies and public punishment. As Michel Foucault observed, “The convict should no longer be seen. Only the reading of a punitive sentence announced a crime that must be faceless. The last vestige of grand executions is its own annulment: a shroud to hide a body” (Foucault, 1975: 19). Torture ceased to be a method of investigation and obtaining proof with a view to punishment, it ceased to be punitive in itself, becoming instead an infringement punishable by law. This concept of torture is inseparable from the modern concept of man, from the idea of human dignity and the principle of the inviolability of the body. It is equally inseparable from the current notion of law and from the question of obtaining proof, which can no longer be obtained by means of coercion (Terestchenko, 2008: 78). Even though this shift in the status of torture would seem to indicate that it is on its way toward disappearing as a practice, in reality it simply disappears from view: far from the gaze of public perception, maintained surreptitiously amidst lacunae in the law or sporadically adopted by exceptional regulations, torture continues to be practiced clandestinely. Even though it is universally prohibited, a ban consolidated by means of international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions, its eruptions in the twentieth century, associated with dictatorial and totalitarian regimes and situations of war, show that state torture continues unabated to this day. However, it is difficult to prove. Dictatorships will admit to anything but torture. Thus, the progressive elimination of judicial torture



(In)visible Evidence

485

is accompanied by the almost total invisibility of this practice which, apart from leaving no trace of proof in terms of written, photographic, or other documentation, is developed in such a way as to leave no visible trace.4 “Clean” or “white” torture, whose origin dates back to the 1950s and the experiments begun by the CIA, has another advantage apart from this: it escapes the clear definitions of torture, opening a chink for its entry into law, a question which has become a pressing matter in contemporary debates about torture. Effectively, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the tide has begun to turn for torture. After September 11, and the anti-terrorism policy implemented by the Bush administration, there have been innumerable attempts to reintroduce it into the legal sphere. Simultaneously, flagellated bodies have returned to the realm of our everyday perception. From the time when images from Abu Ghraib were disseminated in April 2004 to the proliferation of mangled bodies being exhibited in the wake of the Arab Spring, torture has become increasingly present to view. Images of tortured bodies are propagated on a global scale, revealing that, after all, the interdictions concerning the body had already long been redrawn, as had the very perception of what constitutes torture. In fact, when the photographs from Abu Ghraib became public, torture had already been firmly implanted in our everyday lives: in video games, in television series, in programs for mass consumption. One of the aspects that is most evident in this scenario is the ideological rehabilitation of torture as well as the shift in the notions of victim and executioner. The TV series 24 embodied the television matrix of this reversal. Not only does torture become justifiable due to the paradigm of the emergency situation, the “tickingbomb scenario,” but the implicit ethical stance (“a kind of suspension of ordinary moral concerns” [Zizek, 2006]) gives rise to an express rehabilitation of the figure of the executioner. The hero’s sacrificial dimension confers upon him “a tragic-ethical grandeur,” in the words of Zizek, a grandeur that constitutes the basis for a new paradigm, that of a “noble torturer” (Terestchenko, 2008: 87). This brings us to a new narrative figure, that of the “executor-hero” (Portelli, 2011: 200). As Zizek notes, the shocking fact of the series is not the demonstration of the use of torture, but rather its normalization (Zizek, 2007). In fact, one of the aspects that the photographs and videos of Abu Ghraib revealed is that torturers are no longer troubled by being seen as such. One of the last taboos of torture has thus been broken. On the other hand, in a different way, the notion of victim has also been redefined. This is a condition that, as it gradually became enriched with new figures, became diluted and acquired meanings which were sometimes contrary to their original. A term derived from the sacred lexicon, the word has become so commonplace to the extent that, at one extreme, it can be said that any person is a victim of something. However, the notion has been expressly defined in the Declaration of the Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations by means of its Resolution 40/34, of November 29, 1985: “Victims” [of abuse of power] means persons who, individually or collectively, have suffered harm, including physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, economic loss

486

Susana de Sousa Dias

or substantial impairment of their fundamental rights, through acts or omissions that do not yet constitute violations of national criminal laws but of internationally recognized norms relating to human rights.

In fact, the evolution of the law considered the physical and mental integrity of the individual, but it is precisely this latter aspect, “mental integrity,” which the United States used as an argument in an attempt to redefine torture, giving rise to a debate which endures until today. If one frames the question of the victim within the scope of the dialectics between history and memory, one can see the growing prominence attributed to a figure which, despite its omnipresence over the course of centuries, has always been kept in the shadows (Traverso, 2011: 264). The twentieth century was racked by profound convulsions which made it the “era of the victim.” This tendency to revisit the past through this prism, however, has significant repercussions. The leveling of the notion of victim implies that the reasons why the individual was deemed to be a victim are no longer of interest. There are ideological questions here that should not be overlooked. One can recall the Bitburg controversy in 1985, when Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan, in a joint celebration of war victims and “in a spirit of reconciliation” for 40 years of peace, visited the military cemetery in that city, where numerous members of the Waffen-SS are buried alongside Allied soldiers. This “reconciliation over tombs,” achieved at the cost of a leveling between victims and perpetrators, in a kind of whitewashing of the war crimes committed by the Waffen-SS, can be seen as an attempt to rewrite German history as well as an effort to strengthen an alliance rooted in the Western struggle against communism at a time when nobody could foresee the end of the Cold War. The celebration of the victims more for their status than for their state implies that individuals who contributed toward the suffering and death of others can be placed on the same plane as those whom they tortured and killed. This perverse symmetry, concealing the values and motivations of each individual, not only promotes the camouflaging of political and ideological dimensions but also favors the elimination of the victim as a political subject. In other terms, the raising of the figure of the victim can paradoxically mask its own effacement.

The Voice of the Torturer An analysis of the panorama of contemporary documentaries focusing on torture reveals a clearly discernible new trend: that of documentaries providing torturers a voice. S-21, la machine de mort Khmère Rouge (2003) by Rithy Panh, the trilogy by Anne Aghion about the reconciliation in Rwanda, or her more recent film about the same theme, My Neighbor, My Killer (2009), are some of the films which juxtapose torturers and victims. Massaker (2005) by Monika Borgmann, Nina Menkes, Lokman Slim, and Hermann Theissen, and more recently Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (2011), by Rithy Panh, as well as Joshua Oppenheimer’s The



(In)visible Evidence

487

Act of Killing (2012) focus exclusively on torturers. In the 1980s, Wundkanal by Thomas Harlan, Notre Nazi by Robert Kramer, and Shoah by Claude Lanzmann directly interpellated the figures of torturers, but in completely different ways. This choice is not free from risks, since not only does the torturer become a real person before the camera but filming the torturer implies the director establishing a relationship with him/her. The situation becomes more complex in the case of filmmakers who are directly implicated as victims in the story, as is the case with Rithy Panh. In truth, this is “making a film with/against those who are being filmed” (Collas, 1995). With regard to the notion of “enemy” François Niney asks: “How can one film enemies without making them out to be the devil, without falling into the worst propaganda trap, but also without becoming their mouthpiece, or even without commencing a dialogue with them?” (Niney, 1995: 24). Niney further states that one can film enemies in one of two ways, either by simply “recognizing them” (reconnaître) or actually “knowing them” (connaître). In his view, “the term ‘recognize the enemy’ is understood in the sense of an aerial reconnaissance, as opposed to ‘knowing’ them” (Niney, 1995: 29). In effect, an inside view risks knowing enemies close up, humanizing them. Another risk, adds Niney, is that of, on the contrary, making enemies into victims. When the documentary did not “speak” but was “spoken” (Niney, 2002: 69), by using a voice-over, these latter risks did not exist, since the torturer was deprived of speech. Now, amidst an “era of the witness” the question takes on new contours. Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell by Rithy Panh sprang precisely from this question and the status which can be given to the word. The decision to make the film was taken when he learnt that the commander of the S-21 extermination camp was going to be tried in court. In his own words: I feared that the Khmer Rouge would use the tribunal as a pulpit. It was to fight against revisionism, against denial, to ensure that another history can be written that I felt the need to provide my point of view. It was equally important for me to return to Duch, who was not in [my film] S-21 … In S-21, Duch could not say: ‘I saw the bloodbath, I ordered it.’ As long as Duch did not confirm it, it would remain an assumption. Now it is all right, it has been said. I am now at peace with regard to future generations. (Panh, 2012; for a more in-depth discussion of Duch, see Chapter 23)

These issues – testimony and the heuristics of proof, as well as the symbolic power of words and the urgency to create a common legacy apart from official memories5 – are crucial when what is in question is state torture. This is a field where compiling oral testimonies becomes extremely relevant, insofar as their utterances are “an assertion of the factual reality of the reported event,” producing a “certified narrative” (Ricoeur, 2000: 204). Furthermore, from the moment in which a testimony is taken, it can acquire the status of a document and can thus serve a historic purpose, especially in an age in which historiography is opening up, albeit often with reservations, to discourses of memory. This question is even

488

Susana de Sousa Dias

more important when it pertains to revealing torture for which there is little or no direct documentation. From a brief survey of historical documentaries from the 1970s and 1980s about torture, one common theme emerges: Images of torture are notably absent. It is the accounts of the victims that fill this gap, giving rise to Annette Wieviorka’s formulation of the “era of the witness” (Wieviorka. 1998).6 Two key titles, one made during the Brazilian dictatorship of the 1970s and the other a few years after, revolve around this theme. The former, Brazil, Report on Torture (Haskell Wexler and Saul Landau, Chile, 1971) serves as a denunciation of the dictatorial regime by interviewing 71 political prisoners exiled to Chile, who in lieu of images, bear witness to their own experience of torture. The latter, Que bom te ver viva (How Good to See You Alive, Lúcia Murat, Brazil, 1989), is focused on eight women who were violently tortured in prison and a fictional character. Despite using a radically different mechanism from Brazil, Report on Torture, the 1989 film too contains not a single image of torture, not counting two photographs of a group of dead guerillas. The memory of the torture is thus organized through the words which recreate the images, but also through the absence of these images, as is evident in the first-hand account of one of the protagonists: “One of the forms of torture was to show the decapitated heads of guerrillas. … I could not retain the image. They were people I knew and it left a void. I can see the decapitated heads, I see the faces and I cannot identify them. There is a mist in front of my eyes” (Que bom te ver viva). However, on the contrary, this void can serve as a point of departure for another regime of visibility for events, as is evident in Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985), an exemplary film in this regard. By refusing to show a single archival image and by framing this within the interdiction of the visual representation of the Holocaust (the director even stated that if he had found an image of the concentration camps he would have destroyed it),7 Lanzmann contributed toward a controversy which persists until today. Nevertheless, it is not because of the theme of the unfigurability and unrepresentability of the Holocaust that we refer to this controversy here, but instead because of the lateral aspects that this conflict over images caused. One of these aspects has to do with the opposition between two forms of representation, images and words, while intending to represent the horror. It also has to do with the primacy of one over the other, that is, of the “truthfulness” of the word over the “appearance” of the image, which is in play. This is, in fact, one of the problems which has haunted documentary throughout its history. Contributing toward the debate, Rancière, in his essay “The Intolerable Image,” deconstructs this antagonism, emphasizing that “representation is not the act of producing a visible form but is instead the act of providing an equivalent, something which can be done both by means of the word as well as through the photography” (Rancière, 2008a: 103). While proposing that the issue be shifted from the plane of representation and the intolerability of certain images to that of constructing the victim within a certain distribution of the visible, Rancière rebuts a current argument regarding the role of



(In)visible Evidence

489

images in banalizing horror. As he emphasizes, it is not the profusion of images which banalizes horror, but rather the way in which these images are used. We see too many nameless bodies, too many bodies incapable of returning our gaze, bodies which are the object of words without themselves having the right to speak. … The problem is not to oppose words to visible images. Instead it is to transform the dominant logic which makes the visual the lot of the masses and the verbal the privilege of a few. (Rancière, 2008a: 106)

If both torturers as well as victims are bathed in the same light which materializes the image where they both coexist, the place they occupy differs according to the voice which one chooses to hear. The documentaries made in the wake of Abu Ghraib reprise this issue very incisively (see Chapter 25).

Leontius’s Dilemma A lot has been written about the corpus of images taken within the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and disseminated in 2004. Various aspects set these images apart: the photographs not only show the torture while it is happening but also include torturers posing with their victims; the photographic act is an integral part of the violence; apart from this, there was a very short gap between the time the public had access to the images and the time the events depicted in the photographs took place, which made it possible to have access to the people portrayed. These are images whose anthropological matrix can be traced back to one of the founding texts of Western civilization, Plato’s Republic, more specifically the passage referring to the episode of Leontius and his fascination for seeing tormented bodies: Leontius son of Aglaion, coming up from Piraeus under the outer north wall, perceived corpses laid out near the gallows. He wanted to look, and at the same time he was disgusted with himself and turned away; he fought with himself for a while and covered his face, but, overcome by desire, he held his eyes wide open and ran up to the corpses and said “Look, damn you. Take your fill of the lovely sight!” (Plato, 2006: 439a–440c)8

These are also images that belong to a photographic filiation (if we wish to stay within the history of photography), which includes the photographs of the 100 cuts martyrdom, a torture which ended in 1905 but whose images, sold to tourists in the form of postcards, continued to circulate around the world. As part of this filiation, the images from Abu Ghraib and their use in documentaries clearly revealed the ambiguities, blind spots, and contradictions that occur in the territory of torture. In this context, Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008) is particularly revealing. Bill Nichols, whose reaction to the film was presented in the form of an epistle published in an edition of the online journal Jumpcut dedicated to the theme

490

Susana de Sousa Dias

(Nichols, 2010), highlighted three reasons for the “feelings of revulsion” he felt while watching the documentary: the guards’ perspective, the re-enactments, and the exclusion of the Iraqi prisoners. These objections touch upon three crucial points which have been discussed throughout this text: the ambiguity of the perpetrators’ status, the way in which the victims of the torture are portrayed, and the ways of representing the torture itself. If the perpetrators are depicted in the film as victims of a system, what possible place remains for the victims of the torture, the prisoners? This is a fundamental problem since one of the effects of this ambiguity is precisely the obliteration of the real victims. The re-enactments in Standard Operating Procedure accentuate the vacuum with regard to the victims, reinforced by the voice of the documentary. However, they also draw attention to another aspect: that of the various levels of representation which can be found in the film. Apart from the live images taken during the events, Standard Operating Procedure is riddled with a variety of other types of images: two-dimensional and three-dimensional animated figures, the aforementioned re-enactments, and audio images derived from various verbal discourses. Also, the original video images have been crafted so as to suggest new levels of interpretation (for example, by adding black contours to the image, accentuating the voyeuristic impact for viewers both in the case of the footage of torture, as in the case of the footage of everyday images, reminiscent of innocent home movies). The devices used in the film, however, do not accentuate the diverse nature of the images. On the contrary, they end up equating them at another level. It is no longer the effect of the real that stands out but rather the effect of de-realization and with it the effect of distancing, problematic from various points of view.9 At a time when “the Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one,” to cite Susan Sontag, when “photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events” (Sontag, 2004), the cinematographic gesture of selecting images and selecting the voices that will be heard, opens up ethical as well as historical and political questions. Each choice determines a contribution toward processing the creation of collective memory and toward building an historic memory. Each choice determines what will be kept and what will be discarded, contributing toward the maintenance of some memories and the disappearance of others. We all recognize the name of the private who, in one of the most widely disseminated images of Abu Ghraib, was photographed leading one of the prisoners on a leash. But who knows the name of the prisoner masked by a hood who appears in the image which became an icon of the war in Iraq? Even though they exist in the image, the victims of the torture disappear as subjects; they are anonymous beings, without individual history. More than that, they are homines sacri (Agamben, 1997) simultaneously within the system and outside it, individuals beyond the margins, both in the film as well as in the reality of Abu Ghraib. All this recent iconography of torture raises a question: in an age when visual devices are almost omnipresent, when resources to obtain proof have reached an unprecedented level of scientific sophistication, how does one proceed when there are no elemental objects? How can this violence be shown when nothing was recorded, when there is nothing to see? It is important to keep in mind that, unlike



(In)visible Evidence

491

the intense and exceptional visualization of Abu Ghraib, the perfect torture is one which leaves no trace, no visual, textual, aural, or physical vestige. What does one do when choosing to go against Leontius’ fascination, opting instead for the non-visible side of the image?

Opening Up Time Three images are the genesis for the device used in 48. Figure 22.1, which has already been mentioned, of Conceição Matos, draws our attention to a part of the temporal dimension experienced in a situation of incarceration, allowing us to simultaneously glimpse elements which played a role in the torture, such as the clothes she was wearing at the time when the picture was taken. The second (not shown) is an image of a semi-bald man. When he was arrested and photographed, Manuel Pedro’s baldness was evident. A few weeks later his hair began to sprout and grow, to the great surprise of the police agents, who then subjected him to a new photography session. What these two series of photographs reveal is the disguise of the prisoner and the process of dismantling it. Thus, another temporal order opens up, revealing a time prior to the imprisonment and another condition, which is also subject to an absence of images: underground resistance. Antónia is the young girl who figures in the third photograph of this original set (not shown). The image is disturbing since the young student has a broad smile of contentment. She explained the reason for this: she viewed her arrest as a gift to her parents, both of whom had been political

Figure 22.1  Conceição Matos.

492

Susana de Sousa Dias

Figure 22.2  Three images of António Gervásio.

prisoners; a way of joining family history and a point of honor. What this image opens up is the time of a filiation, suggesting the duration of the dictatorship, which spanned generations; the second time she was arrested and photographed, Antónia, in her turn, had already become a mother. Other images slowly joined these. The photographic series of António Gervásio (Figure 22.2), who was arrested three times, was one of them. Through his images it is possible to see the transformation of a fair-haired lad into a dark-haired mature man, whose visage was heavily marked by life – but also by torture, as he himself revealed during the filming when glancing through the photographs, some of which were taken after he was deprived of sleep. And yet, the anthropometric photographs of prisoners contained in the PIDE/DGS archives are images seemingly similar to any other mug shots. What lurks behind this typology of images and what questions does it contain? Mug shots are images which aim to encapsulate essential elements, to provide the anatomical traces of individuals, containing the fundamental features necessary for identification. It is no coincidence that they have maintained their canonical form ever since this format was systematized in the nineteenth century by Alphonse Bertillon. The “dogmatization” (Bertillon, 1890) implemented by him sought not just to ensure uniformity in terms of methods to obtain photographs of prisoners, but also to make them precise, eliminating any factor of variability. However, analyzing the conditions in which such images were taken, it is equally obvious that it sets in motion an eminently repressive system of forces. Not only is the individual being photographed a forced subject, obliged to corporal constraints, but the photographer too has to comply with conditions while composing the portrait which entail a set of rigid precepts (pose, lighting, distance, background, etc.). As a matter of fact, these are always “forced portraits” (Phéline, 1985) and, despite their seeming neutrality, these images are strongly codified from the technical point of view but also from the ideological one in the sense that they end up inscribing the people portrayed within the general notion of “miscreant.” They are also characterized by an “aesthetic of transparency” (Rouillé, 2005). The reduction of the image to the strict purpose of representational accuracy implies that its worth as analogon prevails over its epistemological value. It is precisely this aspect of transparency which causes only the portrayed person to be seen instead of the image in its amplitude.



(In)visible Evidence

493

Moreover, these images were essentially produced to be archived. This condition is an integral part of their very genesis, unlike other types of identification aimed at public dissemination. And yet, these faces reveal a dimension of the actions of the political police that no written document could express. Revealing them thus implies a redemption, by exposing something which the authoritarian regime wished to hide. When there is nothing which shows what happened, when it is impossible to make events visible, these photographs became a veritable doorway to access the insides of prisons. They are also powerful images from the symbolic point of view: they are the images which marked the transition of an individual into the condition of a political prisoner. Apart from this, they reflect the society of the age: clothes, poses, expressions, everything indicates a period under a dictatorship. However, the original purpose of these images – to be an instrument of recognition and also of power – even today creates a veil which prevents them from really being seen. Opening up these images thus implies various operations, both in terms of presenting them (context, duration, articulation within the narrative) as well as choosing the voices which will be heard. In fact, 48 emerges precisely as a result of two lacunae: the absence of images and the absence of words which could reveal what unfolded in the prison at the time and in the processes of torture. While it is true that official reports of the events which occurred during that period within the prison’s walls have been preserved at the PIDE/DGS archive, it is equally true that the words of prisoners which figure there have been truncated: censored (or self-censored) in private documents (correspondence, for example)10 or rewritten by the hand of the political police in official documents (inquiries, minutes, reports, etc.). Apart from this, the police “omitted or falsified facts and objects of their investigations in their reports … and lied to obtain convictions in courts, despite the absence of evidence” (Pimentel, 2007). The PIDE/ DGS archive reflects the voice of the political police, it contains their discursive productions and what remains is the memory legitimized by these discourses. Opening up these images implies going beyond official reports, it presupposes seeking out secondary details, details which are habitually neglected, seemingly anodyne aspects; to this end it is necessary to go beyond the surface of documents which were deliberately kept, beyond existing historic constructions, looking amid the cracks and gaps of images and words. This operation is inextricably linked with reflecting on the modalities of historical time. We all have a conception of history, even if we are not entirely aware of it. It transpires in films through choices which are made: narrative structure, aesthetic proposals, the themes and issues examined, and so on. Habitually, in a conventional historic documentary, history is presented as a continuous process, while the past is shown as being unambiguous, complete, closed (Rosenstone, 1995). The construction follows an Aristotelian cause-and-effect logic and the device is standardized to a greater or lesser degree: the use of a narrator, interviews, archival images which often only serve to illustrate words being spoken. Even though historians such Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, to cite just two names among those who placed images at the center of their reflections, profoundly reformulated this determinist, linear, and continuous historic model, in the wake of art historians such as Aby

494

Susana de Sousa Dias

Warburg, this model continued to find fertile ground in cinema and, above all, in modern-day television practices. Breaking with this logic implies reformulating canonical models for narrative construction and rejecting both the simplification of ways of treating the temporality of the archival image as well as synthesizing the meaning of past events and objectifying them. Walter Benjamin wrote in The Arcades Project that “the Copernican revolution in historical perception” consisted of ceasing to consider “what has been” as a fixed point which the present strove to understand: Now this relation is to be overturned, and what has been is to become the dialectical reversal – the flash of awakened consciousness. The facts become something that just now first happened to us, first struck us; to establish them is the affair of memory. (Benjamin, 1999: 389)

This is a concept of history which sets out not from past facts “themselves,” a theoretical illusion in Benjamin’s view, but from the movement which recalls them and builds them in the historian’s present context. As Georges Didi-Huberman stated, the true Copernican revolution mooted by Benjamin consisted of having gone from viewing the past as an “objective fact” to viewing the past as a “fact of memory” (Didi-Huberman, 2000: 103). 48 was crafted with this assumption in mind. By presenting historic situations beyond the historicity of the event, by seeking to integrate the set of movements and counter-movements which permeate the images (as well as the words), coalescing diverse temporalities into the same moment, we can subvert the principle of referentiality and the logic of the representation – in other words, we can go beyond the idea of cinema as an “open window on the world.”

Vertical Structure 48 set out from an apparently simple idea and device. The formal premises were clearly defined before the directing process began even though, as has been mentioned, they were subject to a great deal of uncertainty. So much so that it was necessary to see if the device functioned in practice. Thus apart from the formal aspects it was also necessary to resolve – and this was an even slower process – the question of narrative. What history of the Portuguese dictatorship would the film tell? From what perspective? What issues would be examined? The idea of focusing the film on torture arose while compiling the testimonies of Manuel Pedro. The way in which he described one of the sessions of sleep deprivation, of the many torture sessions he endured, was particularly disturbing. The intensity of the experience was reflected in the way in which, more than 40 years later, Manuel Pedro moved seamlessly from real experiences to imaginary hallucinations at the level of his discourse. This equivalence was so singular and the images evoked by his discourse were so powerful – the hallucination was real in the mind of



(In)visible Evidence

495

the prisoners – that the issue of torture overwhelmed every other aspect, even more so considering its relevance in current times.11 The various attempts to structure the film, however, failed repeatedly. The formal idea (with all its inherent problems) was fairly well defined, as was the main subject, but what was really the core issue of 48? One thing was certain, the objective of the film was not to describe the history of torture during the 48 years of the dictatorship but rather to reflect upon this practice by means of the memory of its effects. After some unsuccessful attempts to structure the film “horizontally” in the timeline, I realized that the problem lay in the absence of a “vertical structure,” the structure that would really sustain the film’s entire architecture and enable the narrative to develop subsequently in a far more intense manner. It was hence necessary to delve deeper. The next level was to decide the angle from which the dictatorship would be approached, which would determine the role of torture in the entire film. While the figure of the dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, was decisive for the construction of my previous film, Natureza Morta, in 48 the dictator is mentioned only once and never named. The figure is eliminated in favor of the ways in which an authoritarian system with totalitarian traits acted, which affected the public sphere as well as the personal sphere of private life and thought. Figures and faces fade in the context of the repressive system (a system in which anybody could potentially be an informant), but also in the context of civil society, subject to political and moral precepts that heightened unconscious inhibitions on a collective scale. One of the former prisoners interviewed in 48 stated: “We were all old, I think, we were all old, very old, there were no children, no youths, we all had the same age, we were all masked, wearing the same clothes, the dresses, the things we covered up with.” The prison universe and the actions of the political police on the bodies and minds of political prisoners appear in the film as a microcosm of society, in which a plot of visibility/ non-visibility is disseminated at a collective level. While the film’s core issue might have been identified this was still not enough to determine its structure. As I listened to and edited the interviews, I pinpointed some aspects that interested me in particular; sometimes these were themes that reappeared in different ways in different testimonies; on other occasions it was merely the repetition of words which unexpectedly drew attention to factors, affective as well as cognitive, operating at more profound levels than mere facts. The ideas that appeared and were continuously reorganized into different constellations shaped ways of approaching these testimonies that made it possible to go beyond their more conventional aspects, beyond the discursive statements and the semantic value of words. It is important to note here that, from very early on in the process of developing the film, I abandoned the texts with the transcripts of the interviews, to instead focus on the live testimonies, on hearing the discourse and the words. At a certain point – and this proved to be the key to the entire construction of 48 – I decided to start working on the basis of notions/concepts distilled from the testimonies: power, identity, mask, and so on. To be able to develop them properly, I structured them according to a geometric and abstract construction, which served

496

Susana de Sousa Dias

to support the film’s entire configuration in conceptual terms. This construction was the most profound layer of the vertical structure and was based on a cross. It can be described quite concisely: the two perpendicular axes articulate the notions of “identity” and “mask,” and that of “blindness” (a notion which was not developed as had initially been envisaged) and “power” (of the prisoner). These two axes are traversed by vectors reflecting the various aspects of police action: physical torture, psychological torture, the idea of their omnipresence, and so on. The notions of “similarity” and “recognition” permeate the entire film as underlying aspects. These are the guiding notions that anchor the film’s entire horizontal structure and determine its narrative line. It was this structuring coupled with the editing process that made it possible to deeply penetrate the images and words, enabling a more acute perception of what torture was like, and what it meant to live under a dictatorship. As an example, it is possible to cite one of the operative layers in 48: the permanent circulation between “recognition” and “non-recognition,” notions that are linked to those of “mask” and “identity.” If it is “recognition” that enables a prisoner to describe and remember the moment and circumstances in which the photograph was taken, “non-recognition” takes the image into an indeterminate zone. This circulation creates a short-circuit of referents that causes the image to oscillate between different dimensions (visibility, representation, veracity) enabling it to constantly be updated. The example of Conceição Matos has already been mentioned at the beginning of this text, who described in detail the events involved in the image seen by viewers. António Gervásio, in his turn, recognizes the vestiges of torture on his face in two series of photographs and decodes them before viewers. Manuel Pedro recounts how he prepared for prison and for possible sessions of beatings, wearing various layers of clothes, which are described as viewers see the corresponding image on the screen. However, the same Manuel Pedro looks at another police mug shot of himself and states perplexed: “What I find strange is that this is a photograph taken at the police station … it’s me … but I don’t remember anything.” António Gervásio, in his turn, didn’t recognize himself in the mug shot taken at the first prison: “I don’t remember having that hairstyle. I wouldn’t have been able to recognize myself at all.” This fact of “not recognizing” themselves as well as others – there are situations in which prisoners do not recognize their own relatives in the images (“this is not my mother”) – is intertwined with another level of “non-recognition” related to the reality of living under a dictatorship. It is António Gervásio who describes the episode in which his own wife didn’t recognize him because she had gone years without seeing him and because he was in disguise – a disguise that can be seen in the mug shot that viewers can recognize, despite the profound transformation of the prisoner, who went from being a young, blond man to a mature man with black hair whose face reflected the ravages of his situation. His wife, Lourença, also a former prisoner, had been in identical circumstances: her son did not recognize her when he was finally able to see her after her years underground, when she was imprisoned (the same time when the mug shot viewers see was taken). Her son only knew his mother from a snapshot taken when she was 14 years old.



(In)visible Evidence

497

However, between appearance and reality, between the gaps in the photographic image and the referent, there are two moments when this circulation is polarized. The moment when, there being a total disconnection between the reality being experienced and the image, they end up by coinciding, and another moment when precisely the opposite happens. An example of this is the moment described by António Gervásio, when faced with his image reflected in the mirror after a series of days being tortured with sleep deprivation. The point of not recognizing his own mirror reflection configures an existential limit: We’d all end up totally wrinkled. And the color of our skin would slowly go greenish. The color of a corpse. It is slow death. … One day, I don’t know after how many days, I went to the toilet and passing a place with a mirror. It didn’t look like my face. It looked like somebody else. At one point, you only want death.

Or the moment described by Manuel Pedro when his daughter could finally be with her father and burst into tears; because, all those years when she had visited him in the visitation area, having only seen his torso and not his whole body, she thought he did not have legs. At the time when he describes this episode, Manuel Pedro’s image appears on the screen, showing just his torso, equivalent to the image “seen” by his daughter during all those years. Far from appearing as an emanation of reality, the photographic image appears as a direct correspondence to a mental image – as if there was no reality “offscreen,” as though there was no reality apart from that experienced during the 48 years of the dictatorship.

Montage Within the Shot The editing intensified the process of entering into the depths of the images and the circulation between indeterminate zones, especially the montage “within the shot.” This was particularly complex essentially for two reasons: firstly, because there is no apparent “interior” in the shot. Each shot is a two dimensional surface with a figure and a background. It is not a shot that has any depth itself: there is either a white background or a black background, both two-dimensional; and in the base there are photographic images, that is, still images, with no movement. Moreover, virtually the entire film has a very limited scale around close-ups. So what does it mean to say that montage takes place inside the shot? An “inside” presupposes depth but this does not necessarily consist of visual planes. In 48 the penetration in shots takes place through duration – this is montage in temporal depth. This is created by stretching the time in images – which perforce involves a kind of paradox: how does one stretch time in a photograph? – in articulation with sound and words. In fact, the images are not static in the film. If they were completely immobile, the viewer would learn the information and would stop seeing them, thus creating an effect of blindness before each image after a certain time. One of the solutions I devised was to make micro-movements within the photograph during the filming, later slowed

498

Susana de Sousa Dias

down at the editing table. If the footage were presented at a normal speed, the film’s visuals (which span 93 minutes) would have been no more than seven minutes. In this way, images can be opened up to the disruptive temporal and epistemological effects created by this undecidability between movement and stasis. Another fundamental element of the construction of film is that we do not see the face of the political prisoner today, a factor that has direct consequences on the film’s temporality. If the actual face from the film’s present was shown, it would immediately create a rift between different times, a temporal fracture between the present and the past and, simultaneously, a reduction in the image’s meaning. The persons speaking would present themselves in the concrete time of the present, their descriptions automatically being relegated to the past in which they occurred and which their words try to reconstitute. Inversely, the same thing would happen to archival images, whose role would automatically be reduced to illustrating that same past. This would go against the entire idea of the film, which is precisely to work with the co-presence of multiple and heterogeneous temporalities. The premise of the film is, above all else, to make viewers see the image and, as DidiHuberman said, to be before an image is to be before time. But that is not all. It also means envisaging the image with the “force of the negative in it,” to see the dialectics, to remain in a dilemma, “between knowing and seeing,12 between knowing something and not seeing another one, but, anyway, to see something and not knowing another one” (Didi-Huberman, 1990: 172). However, this choice also derives from two fundamental principles, rooted in an ethical and political matrix: on the one hand, it aims to bring viewers face to face with the political prisoner – and not with the former prisoner, the condition of the person speaking in the present – and, on the other hand, not to immediately relegate the testimonies to the past, but to understand how they reach our times. Keeping this procedural dimension in mind while working, the present itself can be questioned and, with it, the historic and political order of things. All this process resulted in the fact that the status of an image varies, sometimes between exact opposites, even though the shot is not cut, shifting between perception and memory, the physical and the mental. The same image can be both an archival image as well as a memory image; an objective image as well as a mental image; a familiar image and an image imbued with strangeness. In formal terms, the role of the shot also changes, modifying viewers’ perceptions. If sometimes viewers observe the images through their own gaze at other times this observation occurs strictly mediated by the words of the prisoners themselves (when they themselves interact directly with the image). On other occasions, viewers go from being observers to being the ones observed. The image is converted from a field to a counter-field without the shot being cut and incorporating the viewer. The viewer assumes the photographer’s place, an uncomfortable place since it corresponds to the latter’s point of view and, as such, to the symbolic gaze of the incarcerator. In this process, which perforce involves duration, the viewer’s neutrality is called into question. In truth, the shots – in a certain sense sequence shots that lack unity of space, time, and action due to the disconnection between the image and the sound – accentuate



(In)visible Evidence

499

an entirely different relationship with time on the part of viewers, all the more so because it is based on a still image, a photographic image. Irrespective of the reversal in 48 (the photographic image is edited with minimal movement), a stasis is created which leaves scope for the viewer’s own imaginary and makes space for a reflexive thought within the film itself. The fact that the narrative chain of 48 is not framed within an Aristotelian and teleological logic, but is instead constituted by sensitive micro-events, reinforces not only the pensiveness of viewers but also the “pensiveness of the image.” The tension between systems of expression (aesthetic and non-aesthetic) in the mug shot images filmed, intensified by the transposition to the big screen and the treatment of the images (the way they were filmed and edited), configures, in a certain way, what Jacques Rancière formulated through the concept of “pensive image,” “an image which contains a thought which was not thought, a thought which is not liable to be attributed to the intention of the person producing it and which has an effect on the one seeing it, without being linked to a given object” (Rancière, 2008b: 115). This pensiveness can be viewed as a node between diverse indeterminate elements, when various functions of the image work at the same time. This is an image “that contradicts the logic of action” and which, at a cinematographic level, has affinities with Deleuzian image-time. This resistance of the image “to the thought of those who produce it and whoever seeks to identify it” also lies in a factor that corrodes the entire system of forces created not just by the dictatorship’s mechanism for security and repression but also by the photographic device itself. This factor is related to the mechanisms of resistance created by the political prisoners themselves, which, at a time when they have nothing left, is eloquently expressed by their faces. In the words of a former prisoner, Domingos Abrantes: “You can’t prevent the police from taking the photograph, but we are the ones who decide our faces.” This vestige of freedom thwarts the entire photographic logic and punctures the representational device itself and the primordial purpose of the photograph, “To produce an image as similar as possible … to produce the most recognizable image possible, the easiest to identify with the original” (Bertillon, 1890: 11). The use of close-ups in the film highlights these traces of resistance to the system and perturbs the entire logic of the image and its basic function at a judicial level. Far from the domain of representation, of one-sided and partial movements, between seeing and knowing, the gaze is open to the movements of the images across time and what they transmit to us about our present times, since, as Walter Benjamin’s work suggests, the past is always built on the basis of the present.

The Question of Testimony: Traces of the Event Let us return to the question of testimony, a key element in the reconstruction of the past. The way in which events are brought to life by means of the narration is based on past experiences, on the perception of scenes that have taken place, the retention of memories and the way in which these memories are experienced in the present.

500

Susana de Sousa Dias

Habitually, the value of testimony lies in its discursive sphere, in the narratives that are produced, in the facts that are recounted. It is essential, however, to similarly understand how this narrative reconstitutes the traces of the event and what is situated outside this narrative. In this sense, it is important to pay attention not just to the semantic value of the word, but also to the way in which it is said, interrupted or silenced, to the singular voice that pronounces it and the context in which it is made. By paying attention to repetitions, hesitations and pauses, as well as all the sounds occurring parallel to the discourse (sighs, groans, different cadences of breathing, intonation, modulation), forms of communication were found which revealed other levels of information and knowledge, providing viewers different perceptive entry points with regard to the experience of torture. The paralinguistic communication thus proved to be as important as the linguistic communication itself. Sometimes, the first sound that emanates when the former political prisoners view their mug shot was not a word or a formulation of contents but was just that, a sound emitted by the vocal tract. Even though it might appear to be a secondary sound, in 48 it takes on its own unique importance, just like any word. In the course of the filming, while seeing her mug shot, which she had never seen before, Rosa Vizeu made a kind of moan before making a comment about her hair. Similarly, when she saw her mug shot for the first time Maria Galveias also emitted a groan. In much the same manner, the attention paid to the choice of words, apart from their insertion in the sentence and in the discourse, guided editing choices of the testimonies. After groaning Maria Galveias said: “It is that face from there, it is not my face here on the outside.” Alice Capela also referred to the prison space using a deictic (“there”): “That’s how I went … But I had left my son … there. He was with me for almost three months, inside there. But my mother was also there!” This “there,” which incorporates the overall sense of the space of incarceration, can in truth be separated physically into various spaces that constitute the prison universe: cell, isolation cell, torture room, and so on. In conceptual terms, however, it is equivalent to the enclosing space of the “photographic system,” a “system of forces,” but it also encompasses the photographic space and, very concretely, the photograph itself. All the photographs included in the film reveal this “there,” configuring an undetermined place. This place corresponds successively to the prison system, to the penal system, to the system of government, to the political and ideological system, that is, to spheres that circumscribe the individuals and imprison their bodies and minds. In truth, the “there” is not just an abstract utterance but the expression of a reality painfully experienced. The voice editing options, in articulation with the image, sought precisely to provide space for words, so that they were not merely submitted to the discursive sphere. To this end, it was imperative to let them come to life over time, by means of an editing process that proved to be quite complex: selecting and managing sentences and pauses between them in order to arrive at the heart of the discourse of the ex-prisoners so that viewers could have time within the film itself to become conscious of what they are seeing and hearing, to heed the uttered words and the affect behind



(In)visible Evidence

501

them. Sometimes, however, these words do not emerge directly, or, when they do, they are fragmentary. Alice, for example, during the filming mentioned the episode of a failed suicide attempt by her mother in prison, a fact she had never told anyone before. She herself expressed her desire to not speak of this episode: I had to be strong, so as to ensure … that she did not go any further. And … I don’t want to say it. It was that thing. There was that little outhouse, where … where people, where people urinated and where they did things … and she … she saw many things … my mother … she almost committed suicide.

What struck me the most in this case was the fact that she told this story without saying all the words and without using words that would directly have elucidated the event. The substance of sound, apart from the information transmitted by the words and by their place in a discourse, became the true raw material, sometimes communicating more than if it had been articulated in a clear and precise manner. The information is assimilated in another way, through minimal paralinguistic “gestures.” When one works this “saying” apart from its narrative form, apart from the completeness and factual description of the episode narrated, the field opens up and goes beyond a merely narrative or analytical domain. When dissociated from instrumentality, language goes beyond the aspect of information and can thus be understood as a gesture (Agamben, 1995). Listening to a person in the act of speaking, understanding their voice as a gesture, emerges as a political dimension that escapes the technical-instrumental use of language and, simultaneously, cinematographic conventions. Hence, the noises made by the bodies of the former prisoners (the rustle of clothes due to minute movements of their bodies, faint sounds while interacting with their photographs, the creaking of the chairs on which they are seated, for example) assume a crucial importance in the construction of the film. All these sounds are complemented by ambient noises, not just those from the interior place where the interviewees are, but also the sounds that can simultaneously be heard from outside: a dog barking, a passing airplane, an elevator in movement, everyday sounds familiar to us all. In truth, it is this set of sounds that constitutes the filmic space of 48, a space that, along with the narrative construction, ensures that the film is not reduced to a mere album of photographs with a commentary. In fact, 48 also develops and takes form through the sound: each protagonist has their own sound “cell” and, before the viewers see the mug shots, they can hear the physical presence of the person. The fact that the faces of the prisoners today are not shown, as has been mentioned before, follows a political imperative. However, this choice was only truly concretized at the time when I realized that there was no need to show their faces in the present, since, just by resorting to sound, the viewer can have a more physical and sensorial perception of the witness. This “being” with the persons in present times (in their corporal completeness and not just as people transmitting a discourse) brings us closer to their “being” in the diverse situations described, including experiences in the torture room.

502

Susana de Sousa Dias

Colonial Memory Even though it had not been envisaged in the original concept, compiling testimonies from ex-prisoners from Portugal’s former colonies became an imperative part of the project. Torture in Portuguese colonial Africa had far more drastic dimensions than in Portugal and its history has yet to be documented.13 This is further compounded by the fact that the archives have been partially destroyed, contributing toward the fading of the memory of the colonial war in the former colonies involved, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea. There are no judicial photographic records of the ex-prisoners I interviewed, even though they had effectively been photographed. Since a basic principle of 48 was to show the mug shots of the political prisoners, this situation raised problems that had an impact on the film’s construction. The solution reached, after months of pondering, was to incorporate the double erasure to which these prisoners were subjected, simultaneously causing a rupture in the system I had delineated for the film: highlighting the absence of images, assuming the loss of documents, the inexistence of visual archives. A black backdrop was chosen, as well as images that were outside the initial concept of the project, moving archival images (although in the film they appear slowed to a speed of 1%). Thus, Amós Mahanjane, the first African prisoner, begins to speak against a black background. This computer-generated black background gives way to a new blackness, this time obtained photographically. As the audible voice utterances begin to develop, this latter blackness acquires mutations derived from luminous dust and points of light due to the wear and tear of the film. In this manner the film then moves from an image whose abstraction suggests to viewers the representation of night to an image that is in fact an actual photographed night: it is the night of a landscape that is seen shortly thereafter. Before Matias Mboa, the second African prisoner, begins to speak, the image is deframed and one can see the white border of the projection window. The nocturnal landscape is inscribed over this white border, sporadically scanned by a surveillance light projector, an image that was actually filmed by members of the Portuguese army in Guinea-Bissau, during the colonial war (1961–1974). This landscape that appears intermittently in this manner is a landscape “of surface,” not a landscape which can be “entered.” The shot is not conceived as an “open window,” following the theoretical paradigm of transparency, but rather as a “surface of inscription,” revealing the material nature of cinema and its inexorable opacity. The idea of an immediate, total and transparent vision – a saturation of the gaze and its eternally illusionary plenitude – is opposed by the image, always incomplete, and by the spoken word (along with the bodies, not as an abstract entity), always subject to sensory tensions and resistances. It is by assuming the lacunae, the lapses and non-sayings, as well as the bodies apart from the images, in contrast to the will of rationalization and visualization that one can rework acquired views from history. This is the way in which cinema can intrinsically be political.



(In)visible Evidence

503

Final Notes Contemplating the subject of the representability of torture and the issue of the limits of depicting violence implies examining the means of articulating words and images and the devices that frame them. The hierarchy of their relations, the norms that govern them, and the use of the cinematographic forms and materials that bring such depictions to life all entail aesthetic choices but also ideological ones, irrespective of the degree of intentionality guiding such choices. In effect, the choices made while selecting certain images and setting others aside, interpreting one utterance as discourse and another as noise (Rancière), introducing fissures or not in the representative device, implies instituting and maintaining certain regimes of visibility and audibility. This is not a question of just establishing what is seen and heard, but above all what makes what is seen and heard possible. In this sense, it falls within the sphere of the political. De-crystallizing the past and assuming the unstable constructions of history, while also challenging entrenched spatial-temporal narrative and representational categories, assuming the “power of suspension installed by the gaze and the word,” can be eminently political gestures. Gestures that can enable the exhumation of buried, forgotten, obliterated “bodies,” bringing them definitively to light – a way in which the exorcism of the past, mentioned by Eduardo Lourenço and cited at the beginning of this text, can go beyond repression and can, in fact, become a fecund memory. Translated from Portuguese by Roopanjali Roy

Notes 1 The Portuguese political police, created in 1933, was called International State Defence Police (PIDE) between 1945 and 1969 and Directorate-General for Security (DGS) between 1969 and 1974. The archive was opened to the public in 1994. 2 In this regard see de Sousa Dias (2011). 3 As an example, Sweden, 1772, Austria, 1780, Prussia and Russia, 1801, the Vatican, 1818. Cf. Portelli (2011). 4 For this reason, sometimes the proof can only be found by exploring the interior of the body; see Brogdon, Vogel, and McDowell (2003). 5 In this same interview Rithy Panh likewise refers to the issue of the image and the way in which the testimonies during the process of Duch were recorded: “Just the editing, done live, was recorded. Hence there are no rushes, which creates a real problem in terms of documentation. There are moments when the accused does not agree, gets up and shakes his head. It is important when the accused shakes his head, when he doesn’t look at the victims, it is important when he cries, when he smiles. But we will never see this.”

504

Susana de Sousa Dias

6 The era whose advent was marked by the Eichmann Trial and is associated with the development of the media and audiovisuals. It consists of a process of “democratizing the actors of history” in which “ the individual is thus placed at the heart of society and retrospectively, of History” (Wieviorka, 1998: 128). 7 “And if I had found a film made by an SS man (a secret film, because filming was strictly forbidden), showing how 3000 Jews – men, women, and children – died together, asphyxiated, in a gas chamber at crematorium II in Auschwitz, not only would I not have shown it, but I would have destroyed it. I don’t know why. That’s just how it is” (Lanzmann, 1994). 8 Susan Sontag (2003) and Dominique Baqué (2009) both comment on this passage. 9 In this regard see Lageira (2011). 10 Censorship also affected other symbolic records. A female prisoner embroidered a napkin to gift to her fiancé depicting a couple looking at the sun at the end of a road. The police required her to erase the sun before she was allowed to send the napkin outside the prison (in Processo-Crime 141/53 – Enfermeiras no Estado Novo, Susana de Sousa Dias, 2000, testimony by Isaura Borges Coelho). 11 Part of the shooting of the film was made at the height of the international debate regarding the torture perpetrated by the United States in the context of the war in Iraq, followed by the Obama administration’s revelation of secret documents authorizing the CIA to torture suspects. 12 One can recall the “extreme formula” with which the author of Devant l’image begins this question: “to know without seeing or to see without knowing. A loss in either case. Whoever chooses to know will undoubtedly have gained the unity of the synthesis and the evidence of simple reason: but will lose the real aspect of the object, in the symbolic closure of the discourse that reinvents the object in its own image or better, in its own representation. On the contrary, whoever wishes to see or rather to look, will lose the unity of a closed world to find oneself in the uncomfortable opening of a universe that is henceforth floating, at the mercy of all the winds of meaning” (Didi-Huberman, 1990: 172). 13 Although there are some relevant works worthy of note, e.g., Mateus (2006; 2011).

References Agamben, G. (1995) Notes sur le geste. In Agamben, Moyens sans fins: notes sur le politique, pp. 59–71. Paris: Payot & Rivages. Agamben, G. (1997) Homo sacer, vol. 1, Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue. Paris: Le Seuil. Baqué, D. (2009) L’Effroi du présent: figurer la violence. Paris: Flammarion. Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Bertillon, A. (1890) La Photographie judiciaire, avec un appendice sur la classification et l’identification anthropométriques. Paris: Gauthier-Villars et Fils. Brogdon, G.B., Vogel, H., and McDowell, J.D. (eds.) (2003) A Radiologic Atlas of Abuse, Torture, Terrorism, and Inflicted Trauma. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Collas, G. (1995) Un bien mauvais sujet. Images Documentaires, 23, 11–22. de Sousa Dias, S. (2011) La (in)visibilidad de los prisioneros políticos portugueses o la doble cara del derecho a la image. Notas sobre el film 48. In Sánchez-Biosca, Vicente (ed.) Figuras de la aflicción humana, pp. 73–82. Valencia: MUVIM.



(In)visible Evidence

505

Didi-Huberman, G. (1990) Devant l’image: question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art. Paris: Minuit. Didi-Huberman, G. (2000) Devant le temps: histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images. Paris: Minuit. Foucault, M. (1975) Surveiller et punir, naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard. Hugo, V. (1848) Session of the French National Assembly on September 15, 1848, in Compte rendu des séances de l’Assemblée nationale, vol. 4. Lourenço, E. (1976) O fascismo nunca existiu. Lisbon: Dom Quixote. Lageira, J. (2010) Contre la souffrance des outres. In Lageira, La Déréalisation du monde: réalité et fiction en conflit. Paris: Jacqueline Chambon. Lanzmann, C. (1994) Holocauste, la représentation impossible. Le Monde, March 3. Mateus, Dalila Cabrita (2006) Memórias do colonialismo e da guerra. Alfragide: ASA. Mateus, Dalila Cabrita (2011) A PIDE/DGS na guerra colonial (1961–1974). Lisbon: Terramar. Nichols, B. (2010) Feelings of Revulsion and the Limits of Academic Discourse. Jumpcut, 52, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/sopNichols/index.html, accessed August 6, 2013. Niney, F. (1995) Confondre l’ennemi sans se confondre avec lui. Images Documentaires, 23, 23–36. Niney, F. (2002) L’Épreuve du réel à l’écran: essai sur le principe de réalité documentaire. Bruxelles: De Boeck Université. Panh, R. (2012) Rithy Panh: “J’ai eu peur que les Khmers rouges se servent du tribunal comme d’une tribune.” Nonfiction.fr, January 21, http://www.nonfiction.fr/article-5402-rithy_ panh__jai_eu_peur_que_les_khmers_rouges_se_servent_du_tribunal_comme_dune_ tribune.htm, accessed August 6, 2014. Phéline, C. (1985) L’Image accusatrice. Laplume: Association de critique contemporaine en photographie. Pimentel, I.F. (2007) A história da PIDE. Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores. Plato (2006) The Republic, trans. R.E. Allen. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Portelli, S. (2011) Pourquoi la torture? Paris: Vrin. Rancière, J. (2008a) L’Image intolérable. In Rancière, Le Spectateur émancipé, pp. 93–114. Paris: La Fabrique. Rancière, J. (2008b) L’Image pensative. In Rancière, Le Spectateur émancipé, pp. 115–142. Paris: La Fabrique. Ricoeur, P. (2000) La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Rosenstone, R. (1995) Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rouillé, A. (2005) La Photographie: entre document et art contemporain. Paris: Gallimard. Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin. Sontag, S. (2004) Regarding the Torture of Others. New York Times, May 23. Terestchenko, M. (2008) Du bon usage de la torture ou comment les démocraties justifient l’injustifiable. Paris: La Découverte. Traverso, E. (2005) Le Passé, modes d’emploi. Paris: La Fabrique. Traverso, E. (2011) L’Histoire comme champ de bataille. Paris: La Découverte. Wieviorka, A. (1998) L’Ère du témoin. Paris: Plon. Zizek, S. (2006) The Depraved Heroes of 24 Are the Himmlers of Hollywood. The Guardian, January 10. Zizek, S. (2007) Knight of the Living Dead. The New York Times, March 24.

23

Interviewing the Devil Interrogating Masters of the Cambodian Genocide Deirdre Boyle

Hannah Arendt (1964) theorized that the greatest evils of history were committed not by fanatics or sociopaths but by individuals who unthinkingly accepted the premises of a state where their actions, however heinous and degrading, were normalized. Arendt’s ideas about the “banality of evil” were inspired by her observations at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who managed the logistics of Hitler’s Final Solution. She proposed that Eichmann’s actions arose not out of a malevolent will to do evil but out of lack of thought and judgment. Critics continue to debate Arendt’s conclusions.1 Had Arendt lived to witness Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia, she would have been confronted with one more example of a totalitarian state that dominated and terrorized individuals from within, where genocide was central to the control of the human person and a basis of the regime. She also would have encountered new trials designed to educate the masses about genocide. And she would have had to ponder once more the moral problem of evil. This essay focuses on genocide in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, and, in particular, on films about two thinking men who have been held responsible for it: Kaing Geuk Eav, better known by his nom de guerre Duch (sounds like Doik), who directed S-21 prison, where roughly 14,000 men, women, and children were detained, tortured, and executed; and Nuon Chea, also known as Brother Number Two, who was second only to Pol Pot and the intellectual architect of Khmer Rouge policy. The essay focuses on two films made by genocide survivors: Enemies of the People, by print journalist Thet Sambath and British-born filmmaker Rob Lemkin (2009, 93 min., Cambodia/UK); Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell, by Cambodia’s leading filmmaker, Rithy Panh (2011, 103 min., Cambodia).2 Both men have been engaged in a life-long effort to understand what happened and help their nation deal A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



Interviewing the Devil

507

with its traumatic past. Their work engages what was once thought to be a European preoccupation with issues of guilt, memory, past responsibility, compliance and collaboration, and the problem of individual and collective retribution, demonstrating the global reach of such concerns today.3

Cinema and the Year Zero Only a smattering of documentary films and television reports have been made about the Cambodian genocide. There has been nothing approaching the outpouring of films about the Holocaust made over the last half century. Although Pol Pot belongs within the ranks of Hitler, Stalin, Milosevic, and the leaders responsible for Latin America’s “disappeared,” the abuses of the Khmer Rouge have not attracted much cinematic attention until now. With the convening of a special UN-Cambodian tribunal – the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)4 – and at least two cases designated for prosecution, a new era of filmmaking about this genocide has begun. Until recently, the most widely known film about the Cambodian genocide was a narrative feature film, The Killing Fields (1984), directed by Roland Joffé. It is a fiction film based on the real-life experiences of New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg and his local fixer, journalist Dith Pran, who was handed over to the Khmer Rouge after Western journalists were evacuated from Phnom Penh in 1975. Pran managed to survive four years of forced labor and deprivation and reached a refugee camp where Schanberg finally found him. Film critic Roger Ebert attributed the artistic success of this fine British film to the fact that it broke from the Hollywood mold and focused not on clichéd Western heroes blasting their way into a prison camp to rescue their buddy but instead told the “other” story. Midway through the film, the perspective shifts from Schanberg’s to Pran’s viewpoint as we follow him into the long silence and harrowing ordeal of survival. This shift from the predictable Western vantage point to one focused on the horrific experiences Cambodians endured made this film a classic (Ebert, 1984). In the late 1980s, a short film by Ellen Bruno, a young American filmmaker, sensitively portrayed Cambodia ten years after Democratic Kampuchea fell to Vietnam. In Samsara: Survival and Recovery in Cambodia (1989, 29 min.) Bruno constructed a narration, based on Buddhist texts and the memories of ordinary people, that is spoken over beautifully photographed images of a nation struggling to reclaim the normalcy of daily life (samsara is the Sanskrit word for the cycles of rebirth). Bruno’s poetic approach avoids the traps of sensational imagery, sentimental laments, or political finger-pointing, instead allowing the words and faces of Cambodians and their spiritual tradition to speak on their behalf. Roughly ten years later, Cambodian filmmakers directly affected by the Khmer Rouge scourge began making films of witness. Rithy Panh’s powerful S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003, 101 min.) is arguably the most revealing documentary that has been made on the Cambodian genocide. Now, with an international criminal tribunal underway, a stream of films and books on the topic has begun to appear.

508

Deirdre Boyle

In 2008, Steven Okazaki produced a short documentary for HBO about three survivors of S-21 and the 16-year-old solider-photographer who recorded the images of those about to die, The Conscience of Nhem En (34 min.). Though different in style from Panh’s work, Okazaki’s film also reveals the face of an unrepentant Khmer Rouge functionary amid the few who survived S-21’s horrors. Adrian Maben’s Comrade Duch: The Bookkeeper of Death (2011, 82 min.) is a British-made film that offers fascinating details about Duch’s life and character and, like Brother Number One (2011, 97 min.) by New Zealanders Annie Goldson and Rob Hamill, takes us into the court to see Duch on trial. Both films address the torture and genocide at S-21 through the perspective of outsiders – in the former, it is the Irish photographer Nic Dunlop, whose identification of Duch in 1997 led to his arrest; in the latter, it is New Zealander Rob Hamill, who gave testimony as a civil party witness at Duch’s trial, where he spoke about his eldest brother’s suffering and death at S-21. Memorable is Hamill reading from brother Kerry’s confession, pointing up his humor and efforts at communicating with his family with insider lines that triumph over the dictates of a Khmer Rouge script. Both films are rigorously researched and rich in details; the former follows the style of an investigative report, the latter is a sprawling personal odyssey of healing for Hamill. I have chosen to focus on films made by insiders to this tragedy. This essay works off the premise that only those who have experienced “unbelievable” events can render them believable (White, 1996). I would redefine this to suggest that as insiders, they bring to the project of remembrance something no outside observer possesses, a capacity for empathy, understanding, and possible forgiveness born out of the need to survive atrocity with one’s humanity intact. And of all the films made, these are the only ones that interview at length key people behind the genocide: its aging architect and its chief executioner.

Some Background to a Genocide Cambodia was freed from French colonial rule in 1953 and then led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was reputed to be sympathetic to China, North Vietnam, and native communist insurgents like the Khmer Rouge. Although he agreed to allow US bombing of Vietnamese forces lodged in Cambodia in 1969, in an effort to protect his regime from being toppled by Vietnam, he was ousted in a military coup in 1970 that placed the US-backed Lon Nol in power. Over the next five years, the Khmer Rouge (KR) fought a civil war against Lon Nol’s corrupt government and won. Between 1975 and 1979, the KR attempted to rebuild Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia’s name under communist rule) into their vision of an agrarian utopia. More radical than Mao Zedong, the KR believed in a version of Marxist-Leninist revolution that gave them carte blanche to dismantle modern life – banning ­education, religion, money, private property – and evacuate all citizenry to rural farms where the people were worked to death. Angkar (the Organization) was led by Pol Pot, also known as Brother Number One; he was one of several



Interviewing the Devil

509

French-educated Cambodians who collaborated on an experiment in forging utopia through terror. In those same four years, the KR’s paranoid state had “smashed” their enemies, real or imagined, seeking to eliminate anyone who appeared to challenge or betray them and their cause. In less than four years, almost two million people – one-fourth of the nation’s population of men, women, and children – died from overwork, starvation, untreated disease, torture, and execution. The Khmer Rouge re-engineered Cambodian society by demanding of their cadres moral disengagement,5 convincing people that ethical standards did not apply, separating moral reactions from inhumane conduct by disabling the mechanism of self-condemnation and personal responsibility for one’s acts (Fiske, 2004; Bandura, 1999). Once the KR perceived that “enemies of the state” – allegedly agents of the Vietnamese, the CIA, or traitors from within the party – were lurking ­everywhere, brutal interrogations followed by equally brutal executions were made possible by systematically stripping cadres of their own moral judgment. Torture – beatings, electrocutions, exsanguination, and waterboarding among other terrible techniques – became acceptable to obtain information and were deemed necessary to protect the nation. Inhumane behavior was seen to have a moral purpose (Fawthrop and Jarvis, 2004). It has taken roughly 30 years for Cambodia to address its troubled past. In 2001, a law was passed to set up special courts to judge the Khmer Rouge, and in 2009 the ECCC finally began to prosecute some of the men and women responsible for crimes against humanity committed during Pol Pot’s regime. There are many reasons why it has taken this long for an international court to be convened.6 Suffice it to say, opposition to a tribunal came from the ruling government, led by Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge functionary.7 Many people doubted that a court, if one were convened, would be able to deliver justice to survivors. But a ­tribunal was formed and, for its first case, prosecuted Duch, who was responsible for the administration of Tuol Sleng or S-21, the former Phnom Penh high school turned into a prison where high-ranking members of the Khmer Rouge were interrogated, tortured, and killed along with ordinary people. A second trial focused on crimes committed by members of the Party Center – Nuon Chea, Pol Pot’s deputy and the KR’s chief ideologue; Khieu Samphan, former Cambodian Head of State; Ieng Sary, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, who had been tried along with Pol Pot in a hasty “show trial” held in 1979; and his wife, Ieng Thirith, Minister of Social Affairs.8 Both of these criminal cases have made headline news, reminding the world that atrocities in Cambodia were committed, denied, forgotten, and dismissed by political leaders eager to minimize their own role by redirecting attention to the rebuilding of Cambodian society after decades of colonialism, war, poverty, and human devastation. In 2009, Duch was found guilty and effectively sentenced to 19 additional years imprisonment. This lenient sentence provoked outrage and an outcry over interference with and corruption of the court; the sentence was appealed and in 2012 was overturned. Duch was given the maximum sentence, life imprisonment for crimes against humanity. During the trial, Duch expressed remorse and

510

Deirdre Boyle

apologized for crimes he had committed at S-21, which he later retracted. Case 002 ended on August 7, 2014 with guilty verdicts and life imprisonment for the two remaining defendants, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan.

Patient or Complicit? What does it take to get the Devil to speak the truth? For many viewers, nothing less than prosecutorial zeal will suffice: otherwise, the filmmaker/interviewer is seen to have been “manipulated” or “conned” by the arguments raised, justifications given, or exonerating circumstances offered by that devil. The gold standard for effective prosecutorial interviews is found in the films of Claude Lanzmann, whose life-project of tracking down and interviewing the survivors and perpetrators of the Nazi Holocaust has established many of the norms applied now to all films concerned with genocide and its aftermath. Lanzmann’s skills are brilliantly displayed in his nine-and-a-half hour epic film Shoah (1985), in which he politely yet relentlessly questions and cross-questions his subjects in one-on-one interviews. Other filmmakers tackling other wars and other crimes have experimented with different strategies for exposing the thinking of those responsible for mass death. Without the single-minded prosecutorial pursuit of a Lanzmann, such work often comes in for harsh criticism. Consider how some critics took Errol Morris to task for his approach to Robert S. McNamara in The Fog of War (2003), complaining that he should have forcefully interrogated the former US Secretary of Defense to prove his culpability for mass murder in Vietnam. Accused of being an apologist for a war criminal, Morris approached McNamara with different goals from those demanding their pound of flesh; he was interested in linking past American wars to new ones brewing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Determined not to alienate an interview subject, filmmakers like Morris embark on a delicate negotiation often needed for interviews that will be conducted over weeks, months, and even years. It is worth bearing this in mind when considering how and why Panh and Thet patiently developed relationships that would allow them to interview their unreliable subjects in depth over time. They wanted to understand how these once powerful and influential men explained their actions and what their rationale had been for acts now labeled crimes against humanity. The filmmakers did not condemn these men although they used the evidence available to challenge what they were being told. They reserved judgment, negotiating a middle ground where a measured exchange of power was calculated to sustain the subject’s cooperation while allowing the viewer to gain insight into that person. Both filmmakers to greater or lesser degree “identify” with the devil before them. Identifying with another is a distinctly human talent and a highly useful one; it does not mean agreeing with another. Both filmmakers were faced with men performing for the camera, rehearsing stories for posterity and for the trials that would decide their futures. Both worked with and around that limitation to disclose these soft-spoken, avuncular, arrogant, and complacent masters of evil.



Interviewing the Devil

511

Performing Truth9 When it comes to judging the truth of a character in a documentary, the theory that seems most relevant comes from cinéma vérité. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin famously demonstrated in their classic film, Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été, 1960), that we are never more authentically ourselves than when we are performing for the camera. In contrast to rival theories offered by direct cinema practitioners at the time, who claimed it was only when a subject forgot the camera that the truth could be observed, Rouch and Morin cast their subjects as actors, deliberately provoked them, reminded them of the film being made, and staged their encounters with each other to draw out their thoughts and feelings for the camera. Whether Panh’s approach to his “witness” is influenced more by Lanzmann’s epic Shoah or by changes in French documentary filmmaking in the mid-1980s (Ba, 2011) rather than the tenets of cinéma vérité, I cannot say, but Panh was exposed to all of these influences when he was a student at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris in the 1980s. Memorable vérité scenes from Chronicle of a Summer seem to have inspired some of the brilliant staging of scenes and the distinctive camera angles in Panh’s documentary film, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. But regardless of the provenance of his cinematic practice, Panh assumes the viewer is capable of seeing and interpreting what is being said; that the viewer can recognize that the truth can be revealed even – and possibly best – when someone is deliberately constructing it for the camera. Unlike Claude Lanzmann, Panh and Thet are not influenced by Biblical interdictions against visual representation. They used whatever was available to pursue their purpose. Existing newsreel footage, propaganda films, photographs, written confessions, paintings, and other internal documents from the KR archival record were incorporated by both and deployed strategically and effectively albeit to different effect. Although the horror of genocide has imposed limits on vivid displays of torture, death, and dehumanization – in part a response to concerns raised over the exploitation of the pain and suffering of victims (Kleinman and Kleinman, 1997) – Panh frequently uses evidentiary visuals to provoke or otherwise comment on what Duch is saying. Even more than serving as rebuttal, these newsreel clips or identity photos, which appear fleetingly, suggest memory fragments that arise and quickly disappear. Whether these evanescent moments stand in as Duch’s memories or the memories of the dead is something viewers will puzzle over after the film ends. In this sense, Panh joins Morris in using cinematic means to summon the ghosts of the past and the fragments of memories buried and half-forgotten.

Audience with the Devil Considered by many to be the cinematic voice of Cambodia, Rithy Panh has produced a number of narrative fiction and documentary films inspired by the genocide. Chief among them is S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, which received

512

Deirdre Boyle

international attention when it was a special selection at Cannes and later shortlisted for an Oscar. In it Panh unites two survivors of S-21 who confront some of the prison guards, interrogators, photographers, executioners, and so-called doctors who served as part of S-21’s killing machine.10 The film offers riveting encounters with the people responsible for torture and execution and uncanny re-enactments where traumatic memory transforms the hellish past into the present. The only thing missing is the man mentioned at every turn by guards and victims alike, Duch, director of S-21. Duch spoke with Panh, who amassed hundreds of hours of ­interviews with him in prison before his ECCC trial began (Fainaru, 2011). These one-on-one sessions serve as the basis for Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell. Duch begins and ends in a prison cell where Duch has been waiting for his case to be heard. At the start, we see him preparing a cup of tea, and at the end, he is performing calisthenics and reading. Compared with S-21’s crude cells of brick or rough-hewn wood, this bright and modern cell-with-a-view is luxurious. Every shot with Duch seems to be in close-up, and even the medium shots of him seated at a table carpeted with photos of victims and stacks of confessions feel intimate. Panh is less concerned with physical place here than with the interior space of one man’s mind, a very perplexing yet intelligent man, a schoolmaster and mathematician proud both of his penmanship and the efficient way he ran a killing machine. In this cell, everything seems clean and proper, including the redoubtable Duch. Before saying anything more, one must acknowledge the irony of this situation captured on film. To be a prisoner at S-21 was to be guilty; confessions extracted through torture served as justification for escalating KR paranoia and the executions that inevitably followed. The coerced confessions were often lengthy and suitable as evidence in a criminal trial, only there was never any trial because there was no system of justice in Democratic Kampuchea, and no one but Angkar to read the absurd confessions tortured people about to be executed were forced to make. Now, almost 40 years later, Duch is a prisoner accorded the dignity and justice he once denied his prisoners. Hundreds of records have been amassed for his defense and lawyers have helped him prepare it. We sense the distance between prisoner Duch and the many thousands of prisoners he once “solved,” one of many KR euphemisms for killing and a chilling reminder of the Nazis’ Final Solution. Duch explains that he was head of the state’s security forces (Santebal).11 Democratic Kampuchea had other prisons, he quickly adds, that were responsible for more deaths, but S-21 was special: it was a secret prison where top figures in the government were tortured, interrogated, and “smashed” as traitors. He reported directly to Son Sen, Minister of Defense, who oversaw the operations of all prisons, and Duch is eager to point up the chain of command and Son Sen’s ultimate responsibility for the operation of prisons. He does not deny his role enforcing work discipline at S-21, training staff in torture methods, making numerous decisions regarding the types of torture used to extract confessions, designating who would die and when, and occasionally attending executions conducted at Choeung Ek, known as The Killing Fields. Nevertheless, Duch believes he is innocent because he claims he was held hostage by KR ideology. He wants us



Interviewing the Devil

513

to believe he is not responsible for what happened, that it is the leadership above him who should be held accountable. We see him reading Balzac in his cell and wonder if he has read Eichmann in Jerusalem too? The man is forthcoming and agreeable. Is this the Devil after all? Panh frequently cuts away from extended close-ups and medium shots of Duch to the now-famous identity photos of S-21; to video testimonies Panh recorded for the earlier film with prison guards, photographers, interrogators, torturers, and a few survivors; and to brief clips from the propaganda footage made by the KR, which shows citizens like ants scurrying in circles to satisfy the will of Angkar. All of this material serves either as prompts for Duch’s comments or as a wordless commentary from Panh. Sometimes the sight of a child walking on a road or a woman carrying a heavy load serves to challenge what has been said without any word uttered. Often Panh has us looking at Duch’s face while he is viewing victim testimonies on a laptop computer, then cuts to full-screen images of the testimony and back again to Duch, observing his face registering undisclosed thoughts and emotions in response to what he views. We begin to experience a peculiar intimacy with this mass murderer whose cocky confidence in his defense strategy radiates throughout the film. In these interviews, Duch is creating a screen persona intended to elicit empathy and compassion. He quotes from a poem by Alfred de Vigny claiming its philosophy has helped him during his ordeal: Weeping or praying – all this is in vain. Shoulder your long and energetic task, The way that Destiny sees fit to ask. Then suffer and so die without complaint.12

Towards the end of the film, in his cell, Duch is reading from the Bible and, it would seem, taking communion (or perhaps medicine). He says rhetorically in voice-over: How did I lose myself in the Marxist proletarian dictatorship? How could I go against my people and consider them my enemy? … When I am forgiven, I will prostrate myself to give thanks. If I’m not forgiven, that will be that until the end of my days.

Alone of all those brought before the criminal court, Duch opted to admit his crimes but assert his innocence, claiming he acted so because he had been in fear for his life while serving as party secretary of S-21. He uses as one of the linchpins for his defense his conversion to Christianity along with his humanitarian work for World Vision, a Christian relief organization. Cynics may view his religious conversion as a way to avoid the debts he has incurred for all his evil deeds. It seems he has not only found forgiveness in this life, he has beaten the laws of karma in the next: he has opted for heaven instead of an endless round of terrible rebirths. This is a film about ideas and their perversions, about words and their power to blind us to amorality. There is nothing to entertain or distract us from what is at stake, no narrative story with suspense, rising action, or satisfying resolution; no

514

Deirdre Boyle

alternate universe in which to escape; no clever visual elements like the falling numbers or eggs in Morris’s The Fog of War to divert us from the subject at hand: there is only torture, death, and responsibility. The reviewer who likened Panh’s film to Morris’s The Fog of War was both right and wrong. Each brilliantly interrogates controversial figures whose actions have altered the course of history. But Panh’s design is unlike Morris’s with its dazzling visual ambush of Robert S. McNamara with Interrotron and lipstick cameras deployed like so many flies around a tough but wounded prey. While Morris circles McNamara, Panh holds Duch unflinchingly before him at arm’s length. Shot in color, everything including Duch himself, dressed in a pale grey shirt, appears to be black-and-white and drained of life. Unlike Morris, Panh does not call any attention to himself as interviewer to highlight key statements, relevant inconsistencies, or the facial “tells” that reveal Duch’s contempt for his victims. Panh steps out of the way and offers us the opportunity to see what he sees and hear what he hears. And in so doing, he quietly, subtly, allows Duch enough rope to hang himself. Panh ends with a black-and-white archival film, an emblematic and fleeting single pan shot of hundreds of Cambodian farm workers hurrying along a bridge; this memory fragment is accompanied by a simple string lament. He then uses text to dedicate the film to his father “for his integrity, courage, and dignity” and offers these lines from a poem by René Char, who was among many things a French Resistance fighter in the Second World War: “Don’t bow your head, except to love / If you die, still you love.” More stoic than Duch, Panh uses these simple yet moving elements juxtaposed at the conclusion of the film to speak about his father and, by extension, all the innocents who died. And remarkably, he leaves us thinking about love, not hatred and revenge.

Friends and Enemies Thet Sambath spent a decade tracking down those responsible for the Cambodian genocide. Like Panh, Thet was a child when his father, mother, and brother died, victims of the KR regime. When he grew up, he became a respected journalist and a man on a mission to locate those responsible for what had happened and ask them “why?” After the death of Pol Pot in 1998, that meant finding Nuon Chea. Over the course of ten years, Thet tracked Nuon Chea down and slowly cultivated an ­exceptional relationship with him, amassing over 1000 hours of audio and video interviews. Nuon Chea had refused to speak with any journalist until Thet won his trust. Based on what he learned, Thet Sambath produced a book and two films, the latter with Rob Lemkin,13 an English documentary filmmaker whose cousin, Rafael Lemkin, coined the term “genocide” and crusaded for years to get the term recognized by international law.14 Enemies of the People (2009) is the first of their two films; Suspicious Minds has yet to be released as of this writing.15 Rob Lemkin travelled to Cambodia with the idea of making a film about the tribunal and was eager to interview Nuon Chea, whose case had yet to reach the court.



Interviewing the Devil

515

Lemkin hired Thet as his “fixer” and translator, roles the journalist had performed before for foreign broadcasters. Lemkin quickly decided that in Thet he had found the ideal subject for his film. One is tempted to see a similarity to Sydney Schanberg’s relationship with Dith Pran, the Cambodian journalist whom the New York Times correspondent hired as his translator and fixer before the Year Zero began. This association is apparently one Lemkin enjoys cultivating. Enemies of the People is an important and historic film, the first to feature Nuon Chea and with unparalleled access to him before his arrest in 2007. However, the film is more about Thet and his quest for the truth than it is an investigation of Nuon Chea. At first I questioned the reliability of Thet, an orphan virtually adopted by Nuon Chea and his family over ten years of weekly interviews. Had he lost perspective by identifying too closely with Nuon Chea? Had he been manipulated by the charming and clever ideologue who saw in his dedicated interviewer a vehicle for his own propaganda, especially when it became clear that a trial was inevitable at which he would have to defend himself and his activities as second in command during the Khmer Rouge regime? But Thet is no one’s fool: Some may say no good can come from talking to killers and dwelling on past horror, but I say these people have sacrificed a lot to tell us the truth. In daring to confess they have done good, perhaps the only good thing left. They and all the killers like them must be part of the process of reconciliation if my country is to move forward. (http:// enemiesofthepeoplemovie.com/Film/Story, accessed August 7, 2014)

Thet has attained an enlightened perspective that few could hope to achieve given the history of suffering and loss he has experienced. His compassion and affection for the KR’s chief ideologue, who approved the executions of thousands of Cambodians including members of his own family, has not clouded the clarity of his vision of the truth. A consummate journalist, Thet withheld judgment over many years of interviewing. He patiently drew out the smiling, gap-toothed Nuon Chea as well as some nearby villagers who had served as executioners during the KR regime. After eliciting answers to the many questions that had troubled him throughout his life, Thet concluded that ideology provided the rationale for mass murder, that Nuon Chea was not the only one responsible for crimes against humanity, and that all of the KR hierarchy shares in the blame. He writes: “Blinded by dogma and perceived threats, those who spread terror in the name of a higher calling created their own logic to justify their actions. And the power of believing one is right cannot be underestimated in what it can lead a person to do” (Chon and Thet, 2010). The film Thet wanted to make would have focused on Nuon Chea, not on his own personal story. Lemkin saw the film differently, and although they are credited as “co-directors,” Lemkin did not involve Thet in the editing process. Lemkin worked with a translator and a Polish film editor, so it is with Lemkin that any hesitations about the finished film arise. In press interviews Lemkin has underscored the drama he was trying to convey, which would bring audiences into “the heart of darkness,” an allusion not so much to Conrad’s novel as to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979),

516

Deirdre Boyle

with its cinematic staging of amorality in the jungles during the Vietnam War. Some may find the reference apt, but it also suggests a questionable desire to turn the true horror of the Cambodian genocide into media spectacle. Lemkin told interviewers that he saw Nuon Chea as a character who suffers “a classic reversal of fortune,” a man at the summit of a murderous regime brought low by his imprisonment, who, “like Oedipus,” must face the truth.16 One obvious distinction to be made is that Oedipus was unaware of what he was doing, and when he learned of his mistakes, suffered terrible guilt over sins he had unwittingly committed. Tragic Oedipus is hardly a figure to compare to Nuon Chea, who has continually rationalized his actions and has apparently spared himself the agonies of remorse. My reservation has to do with the way Lemkin, who retained editorial control over the film, engages in “narrative fetishism,” what has been called “a strategy of undoing, in fantasy, the need for mourning by simulating a condition of intactness, typically by situating the site and origin of loss elsewhere” (White, 1996). By seeking to compare Nuon Chea’s story to an archetypal story of a classical hero undone at the height of his powers, Lemkin fails to represent the reality of killings that Nuon Chea presided over and with it the anxiety it provokes. Instead, he delivers a well-paced story with rising action, climax, and narrative closure that serves the demands of narrative more than it exposes the genocide that inspired it. Enemies of the People was filmed largely in rural Cambodia: in Nuon Chea’s rural home and in a nearby village where Thet interviewed several people who served as KR executioners. The film shuttles between scenes of Nuon Chea shot by interviewer Thet with Thet’s voice-over comments heard over a desktop image, shifting to the same interview now seen and heard on full screen. Woven throughout are picture-postcard images of Cambodia whose beauty stands in marked contrast to the horrors under scrutiny. The film’s structure is well organized around Thet’s quest and moves with speed to a narrative climax, as we shall see, culminating in scenes of Nuon Chea’s arrest. At the very end, we see Thet walking his patch of land, which he has yet to cultivate because he has been obsessed with a story that has taken over his life. Now that Nuon Chea is being prosecuted and production on the film is almost over, Thet can get on with his life, or so filmmaker Lemkin suggests. These final scenes of Thet walking off into the Cambodian future impose a “happy ending” that seems unhappily forced. Foreshadowing is used liberally as Lemkin builds to a climax when Thet Sambath reveals to Nuon Chea his own secret, and one hidden throughout their long relationship: that his family of origin was not alive, as he claimed, but had been wiped out by the Khmer Rouge. Thet had adopted Nuon Chea’s secretive ways and for years he kept the nature of his project hidden from his wife and family, his friends and colleagues, always fearing for his safety and that of the interview tapes. So when Thet finally discloses his secret on camera, the elderly Nuon Chea is visibly stunned. Hesitantly, he offers Thet an unrehearsed apology in a scene that is a spontaneous if somewhat stage-managed admission of guilt. According to Lemkin, Nuon Chea shows his humanity in this scene, which prepares the audience for Thet’s conflicted feelings. Perhaps, but it is not Thet’s conflict



Interviewing the Devil

517

we witness but the unexpected conflict provoked for Nuon Chea, who struggles to master news that casts into doubt his faith in the man to whom he has confided his life story. This rare unguarded moment brings us closer to understanding Nuon Chea, who otherwise never drops his mask, admits guilt, or loses control over himself in his dealings with Thet and Lemkin. But in his comments, Lemkin reveals a surprising blind spot to the full import of this scene. Arguably the most chilling and dramatic scenes in the film are with Kuon and Suon, two former executioners, who not only speak of their experiences killing neighbors and fellow villagers, but – somewhat similar to the re-enacted scenes in S-21 – demonstrate their killing routines. Suon, a Buddhist, feels remorse for his actions and asks how many reincarnations will he spend in hell before being reborn as a human being. Kuon seems less troubled by his past. In a torch-lit scene, the duo speak about cutting out the gall bladders of their victims and drinking them, advised it will cure fever and “cool” the blood. Suon did this reluctantly and only a few times, but Kuon repeatedly found it a bitter but beneficial tonic. The tension between the two, one who admits guilt, the other who hides any feelings he might have, is ­palpable. They did what they were told to do knowing it was wrong; one found purpose, the other, remorse. At the end of the film Lemkin inserts a brief, silent, black-and-white montage of images that he claims affords viewers a catharsis prepared for by Nuon Chea’s “reversal of fortune.” Does he think this montage is like the final scene in Waltz with Bashir (2008)? Ari Folman’s autobiographical documentary consists of staged and animated scenes of the past that finally trigger his suppressed memory of having witnessed a massacre; at the very end of the film, animation gives way to actuality footage of the Sabra and Shatila dead on screen. But unlike the final scene in Waltz with Bashir, the black-and-white montage of images of genocide in Enemies of the People does not deliver the shock of the real, rather it seems to exploit the brutalized corpses and desiccated bones of the Khmer Rouge dead for dramatic effect. Documenting the thoughts of the one man living who is most responsible for the Cambodian genocide is more than enough to make Enemies of the People a landmark film. Yet Thet’s decision to partner with Lemkin seems in the last analysis unfortunate, introducing a story structure driven more by Hollywood than human rights concerns. This is a view that few will probably share since Enemies of the People already has won numerous awards and the praise of critics and viewers alike. Still, almost all of this kudos comes via Western film festivals where the three-act, character-driven feature documentary reigns supreme. Lemkin claims the second film, Suspicious Minds, will be an exciting “political conspiracy thriller about the political conflict at the heart of the Khmer Rouge … another triumph-in-the-face-of-horror pic” (Indiewire, 2010). It is hard to reconcile pitching a film about genocide with a log line designed to sell it like an action-adventure drama. When he writes like this, Lemkin appears to have gone over to the dark side of a documentary industry increasingly defined in terms of its bankable stories and directors who “follow orders” about predictable formats designed to please mass

518

Deirdre Boyle

audiences. It is unfortunate that Lemkin’s torch-lit staging of the discussion about cannibalism à la Apocalypse Now, clearly designed to reinforce drama in the film, borders on what Jill Godmilow terms “the pornography of the real.”17 His otherwise noble aspiration to make films about Cambodia’s tragic past is unfortunately marred by such dubious choices. Nuon Chea’s direct connection to torture and execution remains undocumented, insulated as he was by distance from the day-to-day activities of S-21 and The Killing Fields. Yet, in a larger context, he was more responsible than Duch by having created the ideology that allowed S-21 to function. Enemies of the People offers us a unique opportunity to hear Nuon Chea explain the roots of paranoia that led to the Khmer Rouge’s persecution of enemies suspected of lurking everywhere. But in the film’s focus on Thet’s quest more than on the ideologue who presided over genocide, we miss the opportunity to understand Brother Number Two.

The Poisonous Tree18 In contrast with Enemies of the People, Rithy Panh’s Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell is unlikely to attract mass audiences, and thus far it has only been screened in Cambodia and France. It does not fulfill the expectations of modern audiences looking to experience Schadenfreude and expecting to find it in a documentary about genocide. From the moment we see the accused on camera in Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell, we are confronted with a man wearing a mask, a soft-spoken elder who seems more scholarly than sinister. Panh succeeds in drawing him out to reveal the man still influenced by KR ideology and fully aware of who he is and what he has done. For Rithy Panh, the banality of evil is a seductive formula that allows for misinterpretations. After several hundred hours of interviews with the man responsible for S-21 prison, Panh rejects both ideas of banalization and sacralization. He believes that the commandant of S-21 is neither monster nor fascinating torturer nor ordinary criminal. “He’s a thinking man.”19 An individual with an emotional and intellectual past, who was raised within a society that helped shape him, Duch is one of the people responsible for the elimination. Panh’s unobtrusive interview with Duch allows us to see his thinly-veiled ­contempt for his underlings and victims and his arrogant conviction that he could never be held responsible for crimes against humanity. The inscrutable is scrutinized by a master. This portrait is all about what is and is not said, and finally, about the small cracks in the surface that allow us to look within. Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell may not be a crowd-pleaser or send critics swooning – it lacks bravura ­cinematography, three-act staging, emotional climaxes, melodramatic music, and a satisfying closure at its end – but in its restraint and slow reveals, its singular focus on one man’s mind, it is one of the most riveting films made about a torturer and mass murderer. Would that we came as close to knowing and understanding Nuon Chea in Enemies of the People.



Interviewing the Devil

519

Final Thoughts I have sometimes questioned what value there is in making – and watching – documentaries about genocide. What can they ultimately achieve? Yet for survivors, there is a clear need to ensure that such history be acknowledged, allowing repressed memories to surface, fears to recede, wounds to heal, the guilty to confess, and a nation to move on. Without truth, there can be no reconciliation. And documentaries are one means of revealing the truth even when it lies hidden within dubious truth claims asserted by unreliable subjects. In 2003, Khieu Samphan admitted for the first time that the KR did carry out “systematic killings.” He was Head of State for most of the period of Democratic Kampuchea and Pol Pot’s Prime Minister in the exiled regime after 1979. He attributed his sudden awakening to systematic repression to his viewing of Panh’s film, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (see Associated Press, 2003; Mydans, 2007). Who knows whether it was the film or the prospect of his imminent trial that prompted this admission, but his acknowledgement of the evidence presented in a documentary film argues forcefully for the continued production of such work. When I began studying films about Asian genocides, I grappled with the notion that different cultures demand different cinematic approaches when representing traumatic events. I questioned whether norms established for representing the Holocaust should necessarily be applied to other genocides. I discovered that there were indeed other cultural forms uniquely suited to recuperating collective memory and representing the past (Boyle, 2010). Cultural context should be a factor in determining what is and is not appropriate when remembering the past. But at the same time, I also found myself agreeing with historian Hayden White, who in writing about the Holocaust warns against certain dangers in narrativizing traumatic events. White believes that a narrative that “enfables” a traumatic event and turns it into a complete and satisfying story, risks undoing the event, and its need for mourning, by turning it into something that allows us to master the anxiety which memory of the event provokes. Non-narrative, non-stories offer the best prospect for adequate representations of “unnatural” events, according to White: Modernist techniques of representation provide the possibility of de-fetishizing both events and the fantasy accounts of them which deny the threat they pose, in the very process of pretending to represent them realistically. This de-fetishizing can then clear the way for that process of mourning which alone can relieve the ‘burden of history’ and make a more, if not totally realistic perception of current problems possible. (1996: 32)

This is something Rithy Panh understands and Rob Lemkin does not. An intellectual, a teacher and obsessive workaholic – these two “monsters” of Cambodia are people who look and sound much like us. As we watch them on screen, if we are honest with ourselves, we may find that we identify with them. This is something we need to acknowledge if we are ever to understand our capacity to commit evil and rationalize it. What might we be capable of doing in a world turned upside

520

Deirdre Boyle

Figure 23.1  Duch speaks in Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell.

down, a world like ours today? In the wake of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, we do well to ask ourselves such questions and take seriously what we may not want to hear. What would Hannah Arendt say about the trials being conducted in Cambodia today? Would the testimony of Nuon Chea or Duch prompt different conclusions from her about “the banality of evil”? What would she say about these films? All I can say for sure is that Thet Sambath and Rithy Panh in their dedicated and exceptional work demonstrate the thinking that for Arendt was the exercise of political responsibility, that relentless activity of questioning all that we encounter including ourselves.

Author’s Note The author would like to thank the following people for their assistance in securing copies of the films discussed here: Rithy Panh, Rob Lemkin, Annie Goldson, Adrian Maben, and ITVS staffers Sally Jo Fifer, Rachel Aloy, Nallaly Jimenez, and Sara Brissenden-Smith. Special thanks goes to Alisa Lebow who invited me to write this essay and who was persistence ­personified in securing a viewing copy of one of the films. Much thanks to David Chandler, Deanna Kamiel, Alice Lilly, Aras Ozgün, Miriam Stempler, and Andrei Zagdansky who read drafts and offered helpful advice and editorial suggestions. I am indebted to all who discussed with me many of these ideas while I was writing. Finally, I want to express my appreciation to the filmmakers for works of such historical significance and healing. Your courage and ­willingness to face the Cambodian genocide and its legacy day after day, often over many years, deserves our gratitude and thanks.



Interviewing the Devil

521

Notes 1 A.L. Hinton (2005) writes that explaining genocide in terms of ideology, obedience or cultural proclivity fails to account for the complexities of human behavior. He offers other concepts useful in understanding what has seemed so incomprehensible and is not alone in trying to push beyond Arendt’s “banality of evil” as a comprehensive explanation. Austrian-born British journalist Gitta Sereny conducted interviews with mass murderers and Nazi war criminals like Franz Stangl, commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka, and Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production, in interviews that often spanned many years. She focused on the psychological factors that account for why people commit evil, which she attributed to traumatic conditions generally located in childhood. Personality and personal history will always be factors when understanding violent acts. 2 Both filmmakers wrote books, with collaborators, namely Chon and Thet (2010) and Panh and Bataille (2013: French first edition 2012). 3 In 1997, the government of Cambodia asked the United Nations for help establishing a trial to prosecute senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge and those believed most responsible for grave violations of national and international laws. In 2001 the Cambodian National Assembly passed a law to create the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, and in 2003 the UN agreed to assist with the prosecution of four cases: Case 001: Duch; Case 002: Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, and Ieng Thirith; and Cases 003 and 004: as yet undisclosed suspects. Duch was convicted of crimes against humanity in July 2010; his lenient sentence was appealed and converted to life imprisonment in February 2011. With the death of Ieng Sary in March 2013 and the release of his wife, Ieng Thirith who was rendered unfit to stand trial due to dementia, Case 002 ended on August 7, 2014 with the life imprisonment of Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan. 4 Moral disengagement is a term from social psychology. See Bandura (1999). 5 The scope of this essay precludes analysis of the many reasons why Cambodia has hidden or otherwise attempted to deny its traumatic past. Competing political interests from within and outside the country have struggled over the importance and necessity of examining this troubled past. The efforts of many have ultimately led to the creation of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the international criminal tribunal that, however much it has been criticized for lax legal standards, time-­ consuming preliminaries, and extravagant cost, has finally initiated a national as well as international search for truth and reconciliation. The efforts of filmmakers and journalists like Panh and Thet, among other survivors, have played an important role in this process. Readers interested in this history are urged to consult Fawthrop and Jarvis (2004). Anyone interested in following the trial record for the four cases before the ECCC, will find those records online at: www.eccc.gov.kh/en. 6 Sen altered his opinion about the past, that Cambodia should “dig a hole and bury it,” eventually supporting the creation of a tribunal that would help to “end the culture of impunity” (Eicheson, 2005). 7 Pol Pot died in 1998 under arrest and in suspicious circumstances. 8 I am grateful to John Ellis (2012) for this expression and his interesting ideas about performance in documentary. 9 For a detailed study of the film, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, please see Boyle (2010). 10 Counterparts to Santebal include the Soviet NKVD, the East German Stasi, the Central Case Examination Group in China, the American FBI, and British MI5. Like them,

522

11 12

13 14

15 16

17

18

Deirdre Boyle Santebal was a national security apparatus, but unlike its counterparts, it had no central policymaking office, and no foreign or domestic agents. For more information, see Chandler (1999). http://ki-media.blogspot.com/2009/04/death-of-wolf.html, accessed August 6, 2014. Lemkin is married to a Burmese woman and has made 50 documentaries for British ­television, many on Asian history. He has no direct connection to the Cambodian genocide, but sees parallels between his cousin Rafael Lemkin’s campaign to get the term “genocide” inscribed in international law and Thet’s long quest to uncover the truth about the Cambodian genocide and achieve reconciliation for his people (Pfefferman, 2011). See also Power (2002). Thet is a senior reporter for the English-language daily Phnom Penh Post. He received the 2011 Knight International Journalism Award for his work on the Cambodian ­genocide, and his film Enemies of the People received the Sundance Special Jury Prize for World Documentary and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2010. He has ­undergone harassment since the release of Enemies of the People. He lives now in fear for his life and the lives of his family, believing he may be kidnapped or made to “disappear” by political forces determined to prevent him from continuing work on the new film, Suspicious Minds (The Documentary Filmmakers Group, 2010). See Tribeca Film Institute (2011a; 2011b), Guerrasio (2010), IndieWire (2010). Jill Godmilow (1990) writes, “The ‘pornography of the real’ involves the highly suspect, psychic pleasure of viewing ‘the moving picture real’ … a powerful pornographic interest in real people, real death, real destruction and real suffering, especially of ‘others,’ ­commodities in film. … The pornographic aspect is masked in the documentary by assurances that the film delivers only the actually existing real – thus sincere truths that we need to know about.” Tuol Sleng means “hill of the sleng tree,” which was the name of the land where S-21 was built. Tuol Sleng was chosen by the Vietnamese as the name for the entire S-21 compound in 1980 when they turned the buildings into a Museum of Genocide. A sleng tree bears poisonous fruit. For more information about S-21, see Chandler (1999). Panh and Bataille (2013: 242–243).

References Arendt, H. (1964) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press. Associated Press (2003) Former Khmer Rouge Leader Admits Genocide, The New York Times, December 30. Ba, S.M. (2011) Gathering Dust in the Wind: Memory and the “Real” in Rithy Panh’s S21. In  Taylor, K.E. (ed.) Dekalog 4: On East Asian Filmmakers, pp. 122–139. Brighton, UK: Wallflower Press. Bandura, A. (1999) Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209. Boyle, D. (2010) Trauma, Memory, Documentary: Re-enactment in Two Films by Rithy Panh (Cambodia) and Garin Nugroho (Indonesia) In Sarkar, B. and Walker, J. (eds.) Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering, pp. 155–172. New York: Routledge. Chon, G. and Thet, S. (2010) Behind the Killing Fields: A Khmer Rouge Leader and One of His Victims. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.



Interviewing the Devil

523

Chandler, D. (1999) Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ebert, R. (1984) The Killing Fields. Chicago Sun-Times, January 1, http://www.rogerebert. com/reviews/the-killing-fields-1984, accessed August 7, 2014. Eicheson, C. (2005) After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide. Westport, CT: Praeger. Ellis, J. (2012) Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation. London and New York: Routledge. Fainaru, D. (2011) Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell. Screen Daily, May 15, http://www. screendaily.com/reviews/latest-reviews/duch-master-of-the-forges-of-hell/5027605. article, accessed August 7, 2014. Fawthrop, T. and Jarvis, H. (2004) Getting Away with Genocide? Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. London: Pluto Press. Fiske, S.T. (2004) Social Beings: Core Motives in Social Psychology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Godmilow, Jill (1990) What’s Wrong with the Liberal Documentary. Peace Review, 1(1), 91–98. Guerrasio, J. (2010) Enemies of the People: Co-Director Rob Lemkin. Filmmaker, January 24. Hinton, A.L. (2005) Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press. Indiewire (2010) Killing Fields of Cambodia Explained: Rob Lemkin on Enemies of the People. Indiewire.com, August 4, http://www.indiewire.com/article/killing_fields_of_­ cambodia_explained_rob_lemkin_on_enemies_of_the_people, accessed August 7, 2014. Kleinman, A. and Kleinman, J. (1997) The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times. In Kleinman, A., Dass, V., and Lock, M. (eds.) Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mydans, S. (2007) Cambodia Arrests Former Khmer Rouge Head of State. The New York Times, November 20. Panh, R. and Bataille, C. (2013) The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields, trans. John Cullen. New York: Other Press. Pfefferman, N. (2011) Holocaust Legacy Drives “Enemies” Genocide Film. Jewish Journal, January 19. Power, S. (2002) “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books. The Documentary Filmmakers Group (2010) An Accommodation with History: Rob Lemkin on Enemies of the People. Thedfg.org, December 3, http://thedfg.org/news/details/865/anaccommodation-with-history-rob-lemkin-on-enemies-of-the-people, accessed August 7, 2014. Tribeca Film Institute (2011a) A Conversation with Rob Lemkin, Part I. Tribeca Film Institute, January 10, https://tribecafilminstitute.org/blog/detail/a_conversation_with_ rob_lemkin_part_i, accessed August 7, 2014. Tribeca Film Institute (2011b) A Conversation with Rob Lemkin, Part II. Tribeca Film Institute, January 10, https://tribecafilminstitute.org/blog/detail/a_conversation_with_ rob_lemkin_part_ii, accessed August 7, 2014. White, H. (1996) The Modernist Event. In Sobchack, V. (ed.) The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, pp. 17–38. London: Routledge.

24

The Female Perpetrator

La Flaca Alejandra and Operation Atropos Macarena Gómez-Barris

In Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Maya (played by Jessica Chastain) begins her relentless search for Osama Bin Laden from the location of the torture room, a sequence that not only raises the issue of truth claims regarding the hunt for Bin Laden, as the controversy surrounding the film has emphasized, but also shows the specter of female operatives as silent witnesses and complicit partners in the post9/11 torture scene. The Maya character in Bigelow’s film is only plausible because of the audience’s familiarity with the female perpetrator, a figure that has become ubiquitous within the documentary landscape that presupposes the global war on terror and raises important questions regarding racialized violence, complicity, and the imperial gaze as part and parcel of the circulation of late capitalist visual regimes. This subgenre explores the possibility of a “new” subject of perpetration, female military officers, begging the question of what it means that women are positioned in such proximity to “radical evil.” After the shock of the Abu Ghraib photographs, Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007), Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008), and Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (Rory Kennedy, 2007), the specter of interviewing women to ask them for explanations about their role within the post-9/11 torture scene has become ubiquitous. Of this group, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib explores commonsense narratives that attempt to explain female participation as merely a reactive mode where women “just follow orders.” Kennedy directs attention away from a universalizing theory of perpetration as passive, and instead narrates the conditions that reproduce the culture of military hierarchies and women’s position within them. As many of the young subjects state in the film, “I did it because I was told to do it,” as both an individually passive response to male authority, and as a statement of their structural inability to question hierarchical rules, procedures and power differentials. A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



The Female Perpetrator

525

Despite the fact that the director makes available the important critical lens of active female participation in the torture scene, this documentary, like many others, foregrounds perpetrators’ voices and blocks access to the perspectives of prisoner subjects. So while Abu Ghraib films catalogue the intimate psychological landscapes of perpetration and victimhood in the highly theatricalized space of the torture scene, they do so in ways that emphasize the perpetrators’ experiences and minimize audience engagement with the layers of complexity that is torture. More conventional films in the genre, such as the films I named above, heighten the sense of impossible representation in relationship to the tortured subject, enshrouded as it is by multiple layers of hooded invisibility, and rendered mute by the overdetermined interviews conducted almost exclusively with military perpetrators. These conventional documentaries risk confirming reductive or negative representations of victims against more fully fleshed out accounts of perpetrators and their violent acts. Such violence becomes about a “few bad apples” as many have commented, rather than pointing at the broader institutional violence at work in racial profiling by the military, and the discourses that criminalize and anonymize the enemy combatant. Further, inside and outside of carceral spaces a host of gendered assumptions are made about the dialectics of perpetration and victimhood. These representations in the US-led “global war on terror,” and women’s roles in it, are mediated by female bodies whose complicity is performed through their proximity to the structural and physical violence visited upon the bodies of Muslim male captives. Avery Gordon (2010) describes the logic of the uneven and differential attribution of representation between those abused by the military state and those who organize and conduct the abuse. As she says, “For war captives to the US prison regime and prisoners held in super maximum or security housing conditions, it is arguably the case that communication and representation, both aesthetically and politically, are not only impossible in the sense of futile but also, practically speaking, impermissible” (2010: 20). Gordon looks to other sites of prisoner enunciation, such as suicide letters that come from the space of death to ethically haunt the living. Such archives, she suggests, create the possibility for a more complex rendering of the war prisoner in conditions under which recognizable forms of representation are not available to the detainee, and even less so to the unlawful combatant. Like Gordon, I turn to sites other than the conventional documentaries post-9/11 to understand the problems that emerge from spaces of torture and their representation, especially with respect to female prisoners. My analysis seeks a way out of representational confinement to better understand the dynamics of female perpetration and complicity. Two experimental documentaries in particular perform a more complex rendering of intense subjugation than the conventional documentaries I described above, and through the confiscated lives of imprisonment, illuminate how power and female complicity are shaped in the torture scene. In a more experimental vein that blurs the line between blame and degradation, captivity and freedom, and victim and perpetrator, La Flaca Alejandra: vidas y muertes de una mujer chilena (Skinny Alejandra: Lives and Deaths of a Chilean Woman, 1994) directed by Carmen

526

Macarena Gómez-Barris

Castillo and Operation Atropos (2005) directed by Coco Fusco, visually perform and innovatively archive the complexities of tortured subjectivities and female interrogators’ complicit negotiations with, and enactment of, state power. In two different historical moments of US imperialism, these films mobilize unique aesthetic approaches to confront the racialized female body as a site of inscription, power, and enunciation, escaping easy notions of what it means to witness and/or act on behalf of the state. Experimental filmic strategies such as poetic voice-over commentary, direct address eruptions, and partial views in framing, offer a different kind of viewer engagement regarding the representational meanings of torture, survival, victimhood, and the idioms and practices of complicity. Filmed in Santiago, La Flaca Alejandra is a lyrical and personally reflective documentary about the disintegration of the Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionario (Left Revolutionary Movement, MIR) as a main strategy of Augusto Pinochet’s counterinsurgency program in the early years of the Chilean dictatorship.1 With US training, funding, representational power, and oversight, the Chilean torture chamber became a theater of empire-making during the Cold War, and a primary site of US covert imperialism. Marcia Alejandra Merino, nicknamed “La Flaca Alejandra,” was one of a handful of female former MIR leaders who were used by the state and transformed into collaborators of the DINA, Pinochet’s secret police. The DINA hunted down and killed Miguel Enríquez, the head of the MIR and seriously wounded his girlfriend Carmen Castillo, the film’s director, an event that permanently altered the landscape of possibility for Leftist political and military resistance to the Pinochet regime and its accompanying fundamentalist neoliberal experiment. The torture cell of 1973 Chile was an important site of US empire, and began what was to become a global neoliberal experiment of torturing Leftist activists in hidden chambers (Gómez-Barris, 2009; Klein, 2007). After several torture sessions, Marcia Merino, the central protagonist of the film La Flaca Alejandra, broke and turned against many of her former Mirista compañeros. Merino describes in the film how she was forced to ride shotgun, in an old Buick with tinted windows, alongside Osvaldo Romo Mena, the notorious agent of the secret police. The point of these rides was to identify Miristas on the streets of Santiago and further atomize the ability of the MIR to respond to Pinochet’s rule. Castillo’s film is a personal journey that aims to document the nature of Marcia Marino’s shift from torture victim to collaborator, exploring the psychological sources and intersubjective effects that such a metamorphosis produced for those who suffered at the hands of the DINA. Castillo, a former activist of the MIR and lover of Miguel Enriquez, narrates her own torture in interspersed voice-over within the ominous detention camps of Villa Grimaldi and Calle Londres 38. The film crafts Castillo’s search to understand Merino’s betrayal, and Merino’s confessional narrative responds by arguing that it was not her individual subjective choice to become a collaborator, but instead was the inevitable outcome of her own painful experience with systematic torture and sexual abuse. Throughout the film Merino refutes criticism about her betrayal, such as the one made by cultural critic Diamela Eltit, who said female perpetrators such as Merino and Luz Arce2 were “like



The Female Perpetrator

527

chameleons, they kept changing, reformulating their discourse according to the contingent rotation of centralized power” (2000: 59). Through dialogical scenes between Castillo and Merino, sequences filmed in cars on the streets of Santiago (reenacting Merino and Romo’s dissident track-downs), and visualizations of the fragments of destroyed detention and torture camps, Castillo’s film repositions La Flaca Alejandra’s story from one of blaming the victim to a narrative that humanizes her actions. In an important scene with another torture survivor, Merino talks about her collaboration as one that was drug and violence induced, and thus literally outside of the bounds of her own volition. La Flaca compellingly argues that the acts of extreme torture pushed her beyond her own capacity to rationally respond. Castillo’s documentary complicates the role of female perpetration as following the hierarchical logic and power of male authorities, moving Merino from her dominant characterization as a shadowy protagonist that effectively disarticulated the MIR toward a more compassionate articulation of her collaboration as a limit act of survival within the horrors of the torture scene. Coco Fusco’s Operation Atropos troubles the category of the female perpetrator even further by distancing herself from the dominant representation of female perpetration, where the locus of passive female complicity is about innocent young women officers following the orders of their male superiors. Instead, Fusco uses the torture scene as an ironic performative space that illustrates the pervasiveness and organization of gendered and racialized violence. In the film, Fusco flushes out and makes apparent a host of norms emergent in post-9/11 documentaries and how we understand female bodies in relation to the torture scene, complicating both the hyper-visibility of female companions to male torturers and even the representation of the silent female witness in the recent Zero Dark Thirty scenes of torture. In a surprising conceit, Fusco coordinates six female artists of color to voluntarily undergo an eight-hour torture session conducted by retrained former military personnel who teach torture techniques to civilians through a private corporation. The film opens with a group meeting of Fusco’s volunteer core, with Fusco situated between them reading a letter that asks that the “torturers” be legally released from responsibility over the women’s bodies and what they will endure. As Fusco makes apparent with her commentary, the signed letter imitates the bogus documentation and registration of captives when they first arrive at a detention camp, and gestures to the structural condition of female subordination to the rule of law. In the next scene, men in camouflage descend upon the women’s SUV, blindfold and drag them to a makeshift concentration camp, away from the public eye in the depths of an unidentified rural space. Like the volunteer core, the audience is temporally and spatially disoriented by the sudden ambush, a disorientation that continues throughout the filmed torture session that Fusco and her friends endure. Fusco’s representational strategy of documenting out of the way spaces that are unlocatable replicates the organization of terror of the Cold War, rather than that of the global war on terror. In contrast to the secret detention camps in Santiago, Buenos Aires, and Lima during the dirty wars of the Southern Cone, the repurposed prisons of the Middle East and Cuba have been well-documented sites of torture and detention.

528

Macarena Gómez-Barris

Over the course of several torture sequences, the women become increasingly dehumanized, dressed in orange hooded uniforms, consistently barked at by exmilitary personnel, made to roll in dirt while blindfolded and handcuffed, and subjected to a panoply of mental and physical deprivations. These scenes produce intertextual references to other documentaries on the war on terror, such as Taxi to the Dark Side, that detail the prisoner abuse at Bagram and Guantánamo Bay prisons. Yet the primary modality at work in the film is a performative one, bringing the subjective experience of torture into view and amplifying the affect of disorientation, confusion, and heightened anticipation about the unfolding scales of increasing violence. As known New York performance artists, Fusco and her group collaborate to re-enact, give meaning, trouble, and produce ironic moments in the film where torture is the screen of power and its projection. The act of volunteering to be tortured is an act of self-authorization that is meant to heighten the racialized, gendered dynamics at work in the torture scene and its rendering. Such work makes a direct link and reference to feminist durational performances like those of Marina Abramovic, Yoko Ono, and Julie Tolentino who have, at different historical moments and to different degrees, challenged gender bodily norms, the status of violence on the female body, and the role of the military in producing prolonged conditions of suffering. By making torture, pain, and endurance a representational act that is volitional, Fusco literally connects to an archive of feminist performance that both exposes the matrices of masculine nationalist violence and disturbs its boundaries, ultimately forcing an ethical encounter with its pervasiveness. At stake in this particular staging of violence is how the locus of power in the torture scene relies on the complicity of the masculine gaze that is accustomed to viewing violence in relation to female bodies of color. Fusco and her colleagues are proxies for Muslim male bodies as the most recent target of US empire, and watching their torture forces a different kind of reckoning with the politics of witnessing, perpetration, and the female body’s over-exposure to the field of racialized violence.

Performing Terror In his reflections about Operation Atropos, José Muñoz calls Fusco’s interruption to politics as usual an effort to “denaturalize the government’s ideological camouflage” (2008: 136). Like Taxi to the Dark Side that documents the extent of recent knowledge surrounding the implementation of torture regimes and its legal apparatus, Fusco’s Operation Atropos ruptures the notion that torture camps are either isolated incidents, disorganized spaces, or that they aim to produce random effects on detainees, and instead illustrates the racial project of US empire through the mediations of the performers. In a key grainy scene in what appears to be a basement, one of the blindfolded and handcuffed volunteers cries out in pain, demanding of the team of male perpetrators to know why they are taunting and torturing her to this extent, and when it will let up? Unlike the male hooded Muslim prisoners who did not volunteer to be tortured, this scene marks a turning point in terms of volition, agency, and the



The Female Perpetrator

529

captive’s subjectivity. In this case, the female detainee is visible and audible, able to speak back to her captors, however minimally, and functions as a subject of ­solidarity with the non-representation detainee subject of so many other documentaries. The multi-vectoral representation of embodiment, violence, and the female body in the scene replicates the echoing effects of material and symbolic constructions of difference in the war on terror, whereby the female detainee demands an immediate response from retired military personnel who represent a much wider system of oppressive conditions. In these inverted scenes, the film draws parallels to the dialectic between gendered bodies, interrogation, and the structuring of the torture scene as a reiteration and effect of power, rather than its point of departure. Here, the identification with the captive prisoner is at a critical distance since it is precisely volition that is called into question and the place where Fusco and her team make visible and trouble the lines between agency, captivity, and complicity. Through a compendium performance piece to Operation Atropos and as the second part of the “war on terror” equation, Coco Fusco directly comments upon the figure of the military female perpetrator. Fusco ironically frames the issue of female perpetration by drawing attention to the visibility of female perpetrators such as Lynndie England in the shocking Abu Ghraib photographs, or what Fusco stages as the Bush administration’s equalizing principle. Tongue firmly lodged in cheek, Coco Fusco begins the performance, “A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in America,” with these words: Ladies and gentlemen, it was the great British writer Virginia Woolf who argued that every woman had to have a room of her own in order to manifest her strengths. At the onset of the new millennium, American women finally have what they need to demonstrate their prowess. The War on Terror offers an unprecedented opportunity to the women of this great country.

Fusco suggests that the “new room of feminism” is the interrogation room, and as such draws attention to the problem with liberal feminism that seeks to be on par with men in terms of military prowess, even while it is put in the service of nationalist imperialism to uphold a system of violence. Her performance “A Room of One’s Own” satirizes the endless uses of feminism and female liberty by US imperialism in the post-9/11 era (in Afghanistan, Iraq, and more broadly in the region) as a ploy for increased military ventures on the one hand, and the simplification of Arab American representations of masculinity on the other (Alsultany, 2012). The post-9/11 representational schema of interrogation captured the public’s attention as a novel form of female power, especially in spaces that have been rendered essentially masculine. The “newness” of seeing female interrogators in the torture scene, as Angela Davis has eloquently argued, requires some adjustment but is in no way anathema. She asserts: [T]he representations of women soldiers were quite dramatic and most people found them utterly shocking. But we might also say that they provided the most powerful

530

Macarena Gómez-Barris

evidence of what the most interesting feminist analyses have tried to explain: that there is a difference between the body gendered as female and the set of discourses and ideologies that inform the sex/gender system … We are not accustomed to visually apprehending the difference between female bodies and male supremacist ideologies. Therefore seeing images of a woman engaged in behavior that we associate with male dominance was startling. (2007: 25)

Through the Abu Ghraib photographs it became plausible to imagine female subjects not solely as objects of torture, as in the dirty wars in South America and the anti-colonial wars of Algeria, but also as authority figures in the torture scene, a position that had usually been reserved for the male military official. Yet, the story was quite familiar in its rehearsal, as Davis suggests, of discursive, ideological, and material exchanges between bodies in a racialized sex/gender system of imperial power. Analytically, Fusco’s project destabilizes the notion that dominant patriarchal ideology has to be inevitably expressed through male bodies, and opens up the question of whether female bodies are in fact always implicated in the torture room. While the performance of “A Room of One’s Own” develops and reworks “the rhetoric of gender equality and feminism within our state of exception” (Muñoz, 2008), Operation Atropos has a different function, primarily to deliver performance interruptions into the torture scene and to make visible the complex relays of power and subjugation between bodies in a military hierarchy. On-the-spot interviews with hand-held cameras give voice to male interrogators that “break character,” giving short commentary on the women’s ability to withstand or have stamina when confronted with particular torture techniques. In one of these sidebar commentaries, one interrogator seems particularly gleeful about Fusco’s ability to endure his techniques. This reinforces the power hierarchies in the scene, while also ­inadvertently illuminating the measures of agency that Fusco exerts as director and orchestrator of the torture performance.

Female Betrayal In relation to the Abu Ghraib photographs, Nicholas Mirzoeff believes that, “despite this plethora of visibilities and invisibilities, there is another mode of invisibility attached to these photographs: the very desire to see such violence enacted, recorded, and disseminated has become invisible and unsayable, even as it is everywhere in American culture” (2006: 29). The spectacle of the torture scene in the aftermath of 9/11 that Mirzoeff details operates very differently than the invisibility of its practices in the Cold War torture cells of Latin America. Public renderings of torture passed through and were mediated by the testimonial genre, like the story of La Flaca Alejandra that became a classic narrative of betrayal of the dirty wars of the 1970s in the Southern Cone. However, this prior incarnation of spectral enemies and lingering paranoia resembles the twenty-first-century so-called war on terror. Both periods of empire worked to normalize the condition of torture, and worked as



The Female Perpetrator

531

a public secret of organized detention camps and makeshift prisons in various locations around the world. La Flaca Alejandra is precisely about these public secrets, and representation in director Carmen Castillo’s hands becomes a shattering of the binary between invisibility and visibility as well as a complex portrait of Marcia Merino’s confessional narrative. Through experimenting with the aesthetics of cinema, using filtered light, muted and layered sound, grainy images with blocked views of the street, and intimate portrayals of collaborators, the torture scene in post-Pinochet Chile is rendered as a space of conscious and unconscious occlusions and obscurances. As Castillo explains in an extended voice-over, Marcia Merino was a brilliant and ideologically minded militant who quickly became an important figure in the MIR movement, making her mark nationally as a leader in Curico. Shortly after the coup of September 11, 1973, Merino was captured by the DINA, imprisoned, and tortured until she turned against her compañeros. Like the story of Luz Arce, Merino’s story of betrayal became symbolic of the authoritarian in the neoliberal transition period, even while the topic of collaboration and the many prisoners’ involvement in it was taboo (Lazarra, 2011). How this transformation took place is precisely at the heart of the film’s journey, which operates to move through the recesses and micro-politics of affective exchanges between those who were formerly on the same side of social justice, divided and turned against each other in the torture scene. Many of the early shots in the film highlight shadows from a car window, creating silhouette figures, framed by thick black lines that blot out much of the landscape. The blockages create an impediment to vision, inferring a limited view on multiple levels, a strategy that pervades the film’s visual narrative. Another visual repetition is the image of being disappeared into the condition of torture, which is revisited frequently throughout the film. Castillo plays with light and shadow, the seen and unseen. Images dissolve into elusive grainy shadowy figures in motion that interrupt the more conventional elements of the film’s interviews. Castillo narrates in raspy voice-over how throughout Merino’s captivity she was sending, via alternative communication routes, messages to MIR members about the conditions of her captivity. In the last message Merino details that she will no longer be able to withstand another torture session and, if forced by her oppressors, will finally break. The film narrative follows the story of Merino denouncing a few key MIR leaders and then after a particularly long session where an electric rod is inserted into her vagina, she gives up many more names to the DINA. Quick scenes are interspersed, almost like slides of torture cells, to heighten the narrative tension. Carmen Castillo describes Merino’s breaking point thus, “el cuerpo se disloca la mente se rinde” (the body dislocates, the mind gives in). Castillo narrates the details of Merino’s detention, first held in Calle Londres 38, then transferred to several other holding sites, until she was finally imprisoned in the notorious Villa Grimaldi, the place where she was transformed into the “leyenda, el símbolo de la tradición” (the legendary symbol of betrayal) for a generation of leftist activists. The dialectic between Merino, as the quintessential betrayer and Castillo, as the iconic figure of the MIR, has important symbolic value for the

532

Macarena Gómez-Barris

historical legacy of the dictatorship as well. Castillo places herself in conversation with Merino’s victimization within the dystopic sites of MIR extermination, a haunting backdrop for reckoning with the subterranean memories and the legacies of the Cold War. As the film makes clear, the Cold War depended upon “subversive conversion” or the captivity and torture of male and especially female militants who were forced to become interrogators on behalf of projects of state terror. In contrast to the vast genre of testimonial about the period, such as Luz Arce’s Inferno: A Story of Torture and Survival in Chile (2004), Castillo is after a much more complex rendering of survival where the work of visuality imitates the psychological and self-reflexive process of memory: I made that film after a huge struggle with memory, my thoughts, and emotions. I was able to enter it with neutral emotion, working so that there weren’t confusions over culpability and apologies and my objective was so that the viewer could make their own judgment. What Marcia and I had in common was a relationship with death and I came to listen to the other part of that relationship. (Castillo quoted in Bedregal, 1999: 2, my translation).

Castillo’s affective work in the film comes to take central stage in the narration, complicating the portrayal of Merino’s confession and atonement even while her position as a protagonist with a historical point of view establishes the documentary’s credibility. Castillo’s film also re-enacts the torture scene via a visit with Merino to Villa Grimaldi and through conversations that detail the length of torture sessions, by describing the seduction and imposition of absolute power over female bodies, disrupting presumed accounts of female betrayal. The film attempts to archive terror, dislocating the spectator’s position through a range of affective responses that include surprise, the ethics of witnessing, unsettlement, and proximate suffering. As with Fusco’s film, complicity here is differently enabled, either through performances or through re-enactments that force the viewer to respond. Though Castillo’s film is not about performance per se, the labor of memory is enacted through visits to defunct torture camps, where through interviews with her “oppressor” Merino communicates multiple layers of self-reflexivity and transforms the single location of enunciation into a multidirectional confluence of personal and political histories of the early 1970s. As Castillo narrates: Pushing her they put her in the car in the long trajectory from Santiago. Marcia sees stars. In the second torture scene Marcia talks, the black hole forever. They transfer her, alongside the other prisoners to Casa de José Dominguez Cañas, the new DINA headquarters. The body breaks, the mind gives in. “The skinny one” betrays her friends despite the fact that she is a detainee like the others. A month later she is again transferred to Villa Grimaldi, the new house of torture. There she shares a room with the other two collaborators, Luz and Carola. There they have a bed, rough sheets, and a shower once a day. And of course the dose of morning and evening pills that are never in short supply. La Flaca is no longer la flaca as she is converted into a malleable informant, her gaze is vacant such as in this photo that is taken by the torturer.



The Female Perpetrator

533

Throughout the poetic, but seamless voice-over, the visual narrative tells a more fractured and insecure narrative that questions the certainties of dominant logics of betrayal, confession, and the judgments about female “traitors” with images that are often too dark to make out, lingering in the spaces of shadowy doubt. The camera is in constant motion as if to imitate the torturer’s transport from one place to the next, and the captive’s temporal and spatial dislocation. In one particularly evocative sequence in the first third of the film, the visuals invoke bandaged eyes, a moving train, a dark building, the walls of Villa Grimaldi, close up views of the ruins, until the camera finally settles as it slowly pans over three photos of La Flaca Alejandra taken during her captivity. Unlike Operation Atropos that captures hints and intimations of torture’s reality within a theatrical structure that reproduces the torture scene, the performance of veracity of torture in La Flaca Alejandra operates through memory, re-enactment, and fragments that lend the latter film a ghostly sensibility. Castillo dwells in the locations of death and disappearance as interior spaces, or in the direct encounters with DINA interrogators. A commitment to a raspy and allusive, rather than definitive voice-over deepens the haunting sensibility, temporally set in a past that is very much enlivened and given meaning by contemporary psychological legacies. Castillo haltingly narrates this mnemonic journey as walking through the different rooms, the ruins of the bathrooms. Without direction, without time, it feels as if there is no end to the rules they make, to try to still be oneself, to sustain a self? Almost everyone is dead. Gladys and Miriam were able to survive.

Layered in the sequence of ruins and bare life is the unsettling photograph of Miguel Krasnoff, a Chilean-Austrian general who oversaw much of the secret work of the DINA. In these death spaces that are shot through with the high emotionality of ­torture pain, sinister memories, and the history of defeat, Castillo cinematically introduces the larger structural component of military power that conditions and benefits from the torture scene. In another poignant scene, Marcia Merino flips through a number of photographs of interrogators; lingering over several head shots she tells us that “women were particularly brutal.” But it is Osvaldo Romo Mena, “el Guatón Romo,” whom she singles out for reproach, despite the fact that he may have appeared to be “a good man.” Marcia admonishes his photograph as if speaking to him directly: “you are a sick, perverse, a natural manipulator, an astutely vicious man.” The cathartic moment is a naming process for Merino as both victim and perpetrator in a scene immediately followed by Castillo’s confrontation with Romo. Castillo asks very directly about the DINA and if the blueprint for the Chilean secret police was the Gestapo of the Nazi regime. In a loquacious and overly detailed response that intensifies the scene, Romo refers to the deployment of the civil police and its regional formation in various parts of Chile, which he goes on to enumerate. Romo’s factual account is horizontal in that it accounts for zero responsibility and blame for the systematic torture that he

534

Macarena Gómez-Barris

oversaw. Rather than allow Romo to dominate the film with responses that lead to a dead end through a labyrinth of details, Castillo creates a layered portrait of one clip on top of another that ultimately portrays him as a raging lunatic. At the end of the confrontation she slows down the film and confronts Guatón Romo with the question of Miguel Enríquez’s death, the climax moment of his narration of the film. In this account, Castillo has the final word by displaying his multifaceted duplicity, depriving Romo of voice as she mutes the sound while simultaneously emphasizing his hyper-visibility, through another palimpsestic layering of his image. The inaudible layering makes the military double talk and duplicity regarding the facts of torture palpable to the viewer.

Conclusion In the recent films of the 9/11 aftermath, the “simplified complex” portrayals that Alsultany (2012) refers to in Hollywood images of Arab Americans could also very well reference the figure of the female interrogator within the dominant genre of independent documentary filmmaking. US media portrayals of female interrogators and the debate surrounding women’s roles in the army are often narrated from the perspective of duped female subjectivity, rather than delving into the operations of power in military hierarchies and addressing the pressing questions of military accountability, impunity, and illegality within the ideological framing of the global war on terror. The complicated story of Marcia Merino during the height of the Cold War and regional tensions reminds us that political territoriality and hegemony depended upon the bodies of female militants as mediators and ultimately as betrayers of the social justice causes they espoused, but this betrayal operates through a complex prism of bodily violence, race/class/sexual oppression, and a regime of military and ideological domination. Coco Fusco’s Operation Atropos and Carmen Castillo’s La Flaca Alejandra perform the stakes of female betrayal during war and make acute the question of volition in the use of the disposable bodies of women of color, poor women, and “subversive” revolutionaries by the military and imperial state. These films produce complex portrayals of the racialized female body as the site of subjectivity in front of various projects of male domination that include empire, counter-insurgency, and social control. It is through the female captive body that identifies, witnesses, disavows, and experiences the depth of torture and violence that state punishment is revealed and made salient. Subjugation in the torture scene or of these female lives is never complete or totalizing. Instead state power operates through a force field of effects where the captive female body as volunteer, conscript, or enemy combatant, works as a mediator of the objectives of state power. Mobilizing experimental techniques of re-enactment, disorientation, occlusion, audio dysfunction, and concealment, these films unsettle the viewer and force an ethical confrontation with the politics of displaced blame, witnessing, and betrayal that is recreated by prisoner captivity. As such, these representations cannot be detached from the complex



The Female Perpetrator

535

workings and effects of military power and the making of “democracy” through particular bodies. Indeed such experimental and performative films force us to reconsider the dialectic between impunity and accountability through an ethical encounter with the torture scene.

Notes 1 The MIR was the Chilean radical Left insurgent group that was formed in 1965 and organized poor neighborhoods and trade unions with a base of support throughout key industrial zones in the nation. During the early years of the US-supported Pinochet regime that overthrew Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government, the MIR was targeted by the Chilean secret police for elimination, especially through torture and the disappearance of its members. 2 Luz Arce’s testimonial is detailed in Arce (2004). She was a militant who was detained by the DINA, suffered abuse, and then was a collaborator with the Chilean military.

References Alsultany, Evelyn (2012) Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation After 9/11. New York: New York University Press. Arce, Luz (2004) Inferno: A Story of Terror and Survival in Chile. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bedregal, Ximena (1999) La dictadura, gran máquina del olvido, convirtió a Chile en país de la amnesia general. Interview with Carmen Castillo, May 4, http://www.jornada.unam. mx/1999/04/05/carmen-castillo.htm, accessed August 19, 2014. Davis, Angela (2007) Sexual Coercion, Prisons, and Female Responses. In McKelvey, Tara (ed.) One of the Guys. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press. Eltit, Diamela (2000) Emergencias: escritos sobre literature, arte y poltítica. Santiago: Planeta. Gómez-Barris, Macarena (2009) Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gordon, Avery (2010) The Prisoner’s Curse. In Gray, Herman and Gómez-Barris, Macarena (eds.) Toward a Sociology of a Trace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Klein, Naomi (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador. Lazarra, Micahel J. (2011) Luz Arce and Pinochet’s Chile: Testimony in the Aftermath of State Violence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2006) Invisible Empire: Visual Culture, Embodied Spectacle, and Abu Ghraib. Radical History Review, 95, 21–44. Muñoz, José (2008) Performing the State of Exception: Coco Fusco’s Operation Atropos and A Room of One’s Own. TDR: The Drama Review, 52(1), 136–139.

25

Toward the Dark Side

Seeing Detainee Bodies in Documentary Film Anjali Nath

In January 2005, Moazzam Begg found himself in Cuba on the brink of his release from his detention in Guantanamo Bay, ready to board a plane back to England but still shackled with no key in sight. As a British citizen of Pakistani descent, Begg was detained for nearly three years in various US military detention facilities in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. He was finally released without charge, but not before the kerfuffle broke out over how to properly unfetter him. I reproduce Begg’s account of the moment here: My last memory of Guantánamo Bay is when they led me to the truck that was to take us to the aircraft that would fly us home. They asked me to stand up. They wanted to undo the padlock around my waist before the handcuffs, but they couldn’t, because they didn’t have the key. All the MPs were looking at each other, one person asking another and everyone accusing the next person: “I haven’t got them.” I heard the senior officer, a captain, outside, reprimanding his guards, “How could you do this? It’s so embarrassing.” Eventually they walked in with a huge pair of wire cutters. There was a big, big snap. (Begg, 2006: xx)

The quote captures Begg’s clumsy transition from an incarcerated body caught within the legal black hole of Guantanamo Bay to a “free” subject endowed once again with the rights of British citizenship. Strikingly, for all the precision given to containing a detainee, the captain seemingly failed to notice that the small item needed for his release – a simple key – was on no one’s watch. According to Begg’s narration, it appears more likely that the captain’s exclamation, “How could you do this? It’s so embarrassing,” expressed a grievance over bureaucratic A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



Toward the Dark Side

537

inefficiency rather than a crisis of conscience about practices of military detention. After imprisoning Begg for years without charge, what, specifically, provoked the captain’s sense of embarrassment at that moment? The reader can imagine a convergence of feelings within the captain: shame over failed bureaucracy, acknowledgement of Begg’s “freed” status, and (perhaps less likely) discomfort over the long-term imprisonment of an innocent man. But what might shame and embarrassment illuminate in particular in this scenario? Much in the way shame works through undesired exposure to the other’s gaze, embarrassment works through the optic of recognition (Ahmed, 2004: 103). It hinges on the way in which one feels uncomfortably visible to another. It is at the moment that Begg’s body is officially sanctioned to leave Guantanamo and recognized once again as a British citizen that the captain expresses embarrassment before Begg’s returning gaze. The visual politics of recognition are key here; the captain’s embarrassment reveals complex oppositions and anxieties about liberal humanism, visibility, and recognition, which, I argue, characterize how detainees are understood as subjects within popular American discourse. For detainees, these politics of visibility and recognition structure the conditions of confinement. The architectures of American militarized imprisonment function through the invisible rendering of bodies to military prisons and black sites, producing and classifying detainee files in secret archives, and keeping carceral spaces largely free of journalists. The conditions of detention within these offshore sites are carefully concealed from public view. The inability to see within the detention cell is precisely what renders these military-carceral spaces into what Trevor Paglen (2010) has called “blank spots on the map.” Furthermore the logics of detention hinge upon the understanding of certain lives as grievable, redeemable, and legitimate, while constituting others as less legitimate recipients of the state’s protection and often, therefore, becoming targets of policing and imprisonment (Butler, 2010; Gordon, 2006). These differential subject positions that emerge along the interwoven and assembled nexus of race, sexuality, religion, and culture, among other categories, create tiered relations to liberal notions of “legal rights” (Crenshaw and Peller, 1995; Dayan, 2011). Accordingly, representational acts that attempt to show, re-enact, and/or illustrate militarized imprisonment operate on multiple visual registers, particularly as they attempt to “make visible” that which is hidden from view, and to narrate detention within existing rhetorical constructs within the United States. Two popular documentary films, The Road to Guantanamo (Michael Winterbottom, 2006) and Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007) attempt to represent these unseen spaces of detention, examining the interrogation and torture practices that have been allowed to function within these military prisons where detainees are kept without charge. Taxi to the Dark Side narrates the story of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver killed in US custody at the Bagram Air Base in 2002. Road to Guantanamo re-enacts the journey of the Tipton Three, a trio of young British South Asians who were picked up in Afghanistan after 9/11 and brought to the Guantanamo Bay military prison. Both of these films work within the documentary conventions to represent “real” bodies subjugated through imprisonment and to narrativize

538

Anjali Nath

capture, detention, and torture. Notably, however, neither film incorporates a significant amount of “actual” footage or photography from within these military detention facilities. Thus, as I analyze later, these films work through well-trodden conventions within documentary cinema, conjuring the “feel” of real images through dramatizations or by drawing on the emotional impact of prison-guard testimony, in order to render the undocumented into the fathomable. Both Road to Guantanamo and Taxi to the Dark Side exemplify a tradition within documentary that emphasizes the social justice imperative of against-the-grain storytelling. Although both are set in military prisons and seek to publicize the secret stories of torture and rendition, they enunciate different forms of captivity and death for detainees, who are represented through divergent character tropes within each film. In Road to Guantanamo, the British Asian youth kept in Guantanamo cohere with Western conventions of the sympathetic, modern protagonist with whom the Western viewer might maintain a primary identification. In Taxi to the Dark Side, the rural Afghan taxi driver who dies in US custody does not fully register within Western ideas of personhood, the detainee’s death is instead an unfortunate injustice of US military presence in Afghanistan. Neither film, however, critiques the logics that legitimate these forms of imprisonment, punishment, and violence. Instead, both narrate a story of America’s descent into torture at the expense of considering or portraying the subjection of detainees’ bodies from the vantage point of the detainees. In other words, these films share the sentiment expressed by the captain described in Moazzam Begg’s testimony “How could you do this [to America]? It’s so embarrassing.” The films indict the state’s failure to maintain the precepts of liberal democracy, rather than indicting liberal democracy as the very cause, the ­justifying logic, of these acts of injustice. My analysis of Road to Guantanamo and Taxi to the Dark Side, two films that map bodily movement into carceral spaces, begins with Begg’s testimony on the cusp of his journey out of the US military prison archipelago. This essay thus reverses the usual order of analysis and storytelling around detention and torture. I call into question narrative flows and the ordered ways that the unseen detainee body is created as a grievable subject. As Butler argues, imprisonment hinges on a rational logic that deems bodies “something less than human, and yet – somehow – they assume a human form. They represent, as it were, an equivocation of the human” (Butler, 2006: 74). Although these films challenge military imprisonment, I argue that they do not fundamentally question the ordered rationality that recognizes some humans as the legitimate subjects of rights by negating others as deviant and less worthy. I begin with Begg’s voice to invoke what Haraway (1988) calls a “situated knowledge.” To understand Guantanamo (or post-9/11 military detention) merely as a “stain on the American Military” or an embarrassment is actually an ideological practice that rearticulates the United States as exceptional in its value on human life (Corera, 2008). It is from this ideologically burdened vantage point that these films may oppose War on Terror incarceration without challenging life-negating logics of militarized imprisonment that rely on racial and cultural difference.



Toward the Dark Side

539

Popular Documentary and Social Protest As both titles suggest, Road to Guantanamo and Taxi to the Dark Side narrate a passage into the world animated by Bush-Cheney era policies: the road to Guantanamo, the taxi to the dark side. Strikingly, these names both signal modes of mobility, primarily perhaps, referencing how American exercises of power force movements of detainees across distances and borders, and into detention centers. Rendition, and in particular extraordinary rendition, moving prisoners between prisons and over national boundaries into detention centers in countries known to torture or to CIA black sites, became synonymous with techniques applied uniquely and unfairly in the post-9/11 moment. These forced passages of the detainees become analogized as a move away from a world organized by a liberal rights framework and into a world filled with abuses of power. The path or the road thus refers to the United States’ very trajectory away from liberal democracy and into an alterity – a dark side, a place peppered with Guantanamos and Abu Ghraibs. The idea that there is a journey to a dark side suggests this destination is other than what is already in existence: the implicit assumption being that the United States does not already engage in such nefarious acts and this “dark side” is a departure from the American character. Such titles thus invite the audience to partake in the fantasy that these ­practices are indeed a digression from the essential functions and exercises of the US military. This notion of a singular, narratable story that coheres via a linear journey through American abuses of power obscures the complexity of the United States’ entrenched histories of incarceration and violence. US foreign and domestic policy has been shaped by and through militaristic violence and the brutal negation of varying kinds of bodies. The mere existence of these US-controlled military bases signals a history of military expansion and its attendant imperial impulse; many of these unseen military-carceral spaces exist within the global network of American military bases that number around 900. Although bases, like the Bagram Airfield, often retain local names, these spaces are the “literal and symbolic anchors” of American empire (Lutz, 2009: 6). Even a cursory examination of state-backed violence highlights a very different story; it would be impossible to examine the interrogation manuals like the CIA’s “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual – 1983” and “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation – July 1963,” or the role the United States had in training and funding various dictatorial regimes throughout the world (Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Indonesia, Egypt, Iran, South Korea, etc.), without sensing traces of a uniquely American “dark side” that haunted cell blocks and interrogation centers. In the absence of media coverage that has been critical of US military practices, the documentary genre has played an important role in telling the stories of detainees. Indeed, within the United States and throughout Europe, there has been a long tradition of radical and social justice oriented documentary that has often worked alongside labor movements, civil rights movements, and women’s liberation movements to expose the injustices within society and provide an

540

Anjali Nath

alternative viewpoint (Gaines, 2007: 36–55). The promise of the “true image” specifically resonates in the struggle to document various “histories from below,” and record personal and community histories that have often been sidelined. This apparent ability to expose injustices through the exposure of “actualities” onto film stock (i.e., to reproduce imprints of light) would seem to create other possibilities of existence and visibility for subalterns. Despite the lure of optic verisimilitude, indexicality is a vexed and contradictory terrain (Nichols, 1991; Sontag, 1977). Both Road to Guantanamo and Taxi to the Dark Side rely on strategies of representation that exceed the promise of the “indexical” image as an authentic imprint of the moment, yet are embroiled within the production of affect that the indexical image often provokes. In other words, although neither film works primarily through the exhibition of “real” images of detention centers, both films work to move the viewer using visual idioms of the indexical image. The belief in the veracity of indexical images can engender deep identification with images and translate affective experiences of pain (Gaines, 2007). Concurrent with the Bush-Cheney administration, technological advances in digital video brought about sharp transformations in image-making. The popularization of the digital camera has meant also that (a) representations of everyday life are made by anyone with any number of portable recording devices (digital camera, smartphone, etc.), and (b) the inundation of social life with a variety of images and screens has made widely circulated representations like viral videos and leaked images all the more important in the national imaginary. As people interact with visual culture and media in an increasing number of sites, images of the social world – produced or recreated – become the very vocabulary for understanding and remembering events and their significance. The numerous human rights film festivals that have popped up over the past decade, for instance, exemplify how visual testimony remains uniquely important for exposure of human rights abuses for the public imagination (Hesford, 2011: 59). However, within this image-saturated world there have been few indexical images of War on Terror detainees; spaces like Guantanamo are instead understood to be both legal and visual black holes (Steyn, 2004).The contemporary visual economy of suffering engenders the desire for “real” images of pain, legible evidence of torture, and grievable subjects who are worthy of compassion. Building on existing discussions of Islamophobia, I argue that when the rarely represented detainee appears within torture documentaries (and human rights discourse more broadly), their grievability often hinges on a legibility within existing tropes of racial and cultural difference. Such differences often invoke and reify orientalist binaries between Islam and the West. Mahmood Mamdani argues that this essentialist discourse forms a “culture talk” which becomes a racial code, affirming some cultural practices while suggesting that others need to be disciplined; such a model effectively situates modernity in a linear mode, positing Islam as an antimodern cultural formation (Mamdani, 2005: 18). Through this logic, cultures properly evolving with modernist understandings of liberal humanism have a unique reverence for human life combined with an investment in scientific and legal



Toward the Dark Side

541

rationality meant to properly protect human rights. By contrast, Mamdani notes that non-Western cultures are often constructed in the West as improper in their engagements with modernity, either seen in a temporal lag or outwardly inimical to Western liberalism. As Hesford (2011) argues, human rights discourses and visual rhetorics work within these understandings of modernity to construct only certain non-Western bodies as legitimate human rights subjects. In other words, the legitimately grievable cultural/racial Other cannot be simultaneously interpellated as innately anti-modern. The military prisoner, or “the detainee” does not inherently cohere as a viscerally legible human rights subject. Raymond Williams suggests in his entry on “violence” in Keywords (1985) that people perceived as unruly or ungovernable become subject to “authorized” forms of violence from the state. Bush-Cheney era policies elucidate how “anti-modern” Muslim populations are thereby “spoken to” in the language of bodily violence. The persistence of varying epistemological assumptions about rationality, modernity, and culture cohere in what Mbembe (2003) defines as ­necropolitical logic – the killing, torture, and diminishment of life chances for some populations in the name of government order and, in this case, democracy. As I argue here, this “culture talk” is produced discursively in a variety of visual sites, even in films that attempt to critique the Bush Administration’s detention and ­torture doctrines. Although both documentary films make resistant claims against torture, they work through a visual vocabulary that is, nonetheless, underpinned by a politics of recognition entangled with the very necropolitical logics that exempt detainees from the category of “human.”

The Road to Guantanamo When Winterbottom’s Road to Guantanamo was released in 2006, it was one of the first widely circulated cinematic challenges to detention in the War on Terror. The US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) in Southeast Cuba houses a military carceral institution that was erected to house Haitian refugees during the 1990s, but in the aftermath of 9/11 opened its doors to enemy combatants captured by US or coalition forces. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, nearly 800 people have been detained at some point in the GTMO detention center since 2002, 86% of whom ended up in the custody of coalition forces turned over by Pakistani or Afghan citizens (American Civil Liberties Union, 2014). Road to Guantanamo chronicles the stories of Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal, and Shafiq Rasul, three young British Asian men who were traveling through Pakistan and Afghanistan after 9/11 before being picked up by coalition forces and detained in GTMO for two years. Ahmed, Iqbal, and Rasul made headlines when it came to the public attention that they were British citizens from Tipton, a small town in England, who were classified as enemy combatants and detained without charge. These men, dubbed by journalists “the Tipton Three,” were released from Guantanamo in March of 2004 with much media fanfare. These three young

542

Anjali Nath

British citizens, although gaunt and tired, expressed their stories in clear English to a number of high-profile news outlets. In Road to Guantanamo, Winterbottom effectively recreates their story on screen. When Road to Guantanamo was released in 2006, it debuted in multiple venues simultaneously; in an unprecedented move, the film was made available to viewers in theaters, DVD, and via live stream online all during its first run (BBC, 2006). Yet, for all of the ways that this release made “visible” detainee subjection, the impulse to make the film widely accessible to the public still faced roadblocks. Prior to its release in the United States, the film’s print ad campaign sparked controversy; promoters initially wished to use the now well-known image of the detainee restrained and dressed in the iconic orange jump suit with a burlap sack covering his entire head. However, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) objected to this depiction of torture in the film’s promotional material, which would be visible to moviegoers everywhere (Kennicott, 2006). They cited the importance of keeping children safe from images of violence as a just cause for their censorship and required promoters to alter the design of the poster. Interestingly, this image of an unnamed detainee with a burlap sack over his head was identified as torture in a moment when the use of the term “torture” for practices like waterboarding and sensory deprivation was highly contested. One Pacifica Radio commentator mused, “Why was this poster banned? According to the MPAA, because it depicted an ‘act of torture.’ Well, guess they think that’s okay for the US military in the real world, but not for a movie poster!” (Miller, 2006). The poster censorship seems superfluous given that the film was readily available through numerous media platforms (online, DVD, movie theaters). However, this controversy suggests a set of differential relations to visibility; images of torture at Guantanamo – even this relatively tame representation – are not appropriate when featured on posters that may be displayed on theater lobby walls, billboards, buses, or other spaces readily within public view. These images may only be accessed by the curious viewers who may peer into their computer screen, open their DVD box, or enter into a theater. The banning of this print ad exemplifies the extraordinary regulation on detainee visibility. While the poster controversy points to the complicated ways representations of violence are made available in public spaces, a closer look at the actual images within Road to Guantanamo reveals the complexities in representing these forms of carceral violence. The story follows these young men from their arrival in Pakistan, their road trip to Afghanistan, to their capture and detention by coalition forces. In an interview for Channel 4, Winterbottom called the film “part-road movie, partwar movie, part-prison movie” (Goodhart, n.d.). These narrative structures articulate the Tipton Three as coherent subjects for the Western viewer. An affective solidarity between the viewer and represented detainee hinges on the latter’s subsumption into Hollywood cinema’s familiar frames. As discussed earlier, the theme of “passage” or “journey” allegorically frames the film. Guantanamo opens with shots of young men preparing for a trip that the audience knows will become their passage to Guantanamo (Figure 25.1).



Toward the Dark Side

543

Figure 25.1  Re-enactment of Ruhel Ahmed leaving London, Road to Guantanamo (Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom, 2006, produced by Film4, Revolution Films, and Screen West Midlands).

This is not a story of diasporic subjects rediscovering their roots. In relatively short succession, we see a number of shots that comprise a shaky, documentary-style montage, a reenactment of the boys packing, saying goodbye to their families, and flying in an Emirates Airways plane bound for Pakistan. Wearing headphones, trendy jumpsuits, and knapsacks, the road to Guantanamo thus begins walking down the streets of London, somewhere occidental and known, at the epicenter of Anglo culture.

Dramatization and legibility Stylistically, Road to Guantanamo punctuates interviews of the Tipton Three with both archival news footage and extensive dramatizations of their time in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Cuba. The Tipton Three’s interviews are quite standard, each narrating his story directly to camera, in front of a grey marbled background. In the absence of any “real” images of Guantanamo or footage from the young men’s trip to South Asia, Winterbottom hired non-professional actors to perform their story; accordingly, while I refer to the film as “documentary,” it is often placed within the subgenre of “docudrama.”1 The dramatizations of the Tipton Three’s journey pick up from the interviews, and they are seamlessly interwoven with news media clips from the time, adding to the documentary feel of the film. The dramatizations in Guantanamo are not short vignettes used to illuminate specific instances that the interviewees bring up, but rather they are dramatic performances of the entirety of the story. Shot in shaky documentary style, these images distinctly feel and look indexical; much like Winterbottom’s previous film In This World (2002) – a narrative

544

Anjali Nath

film about Afghan refugee children that extensively employed documentary style – as the dramatic segments could easily be mistaken for live action footage. In the absence of the indexical images representing detention in GTMO, these dramatizations provide a way to imagine what this particular war and incarceration look like. In other words, these dramatizations optically vivify bodies hidden within the dark geographies of the War on Terror. Winterbottom’s choice to employ extensive dramatizations reflects the difficulty of expressing the sensorial reality of incarceration. In an interview, when asked extensively about his choice and construction of dramatization, he responded that his primary impulse was to create an emotional intimacy between the viewer and main characters (Goodhart, n.d.). Bill Nichols suggests realist dramatization, which he considers a subset of re-enactment more broadly, can have an affective function, conjuring the spectral, and the impossibility of seeing the passed moment or absent subject. Yet, he argues, dramatization often employs aesthetic verisimilitude, working through desires for the indexical bond (Nichols, 2008: 84). Bringing the Tipton Three to life as human bodies who move, speak, and emote on screen thus is a radical departure from other accounts of Guantanamo. Yet, Winterbottom’s response also illuminates the challenges in representing the human in ways that do not rely on Western epistemologies of the body. He notes that the dramatizations were the simplest way to convey the Tipton Three as “ordinary British teenagers” in order to “show the gap between what you thought people would be like in Guantanamo and the reality of meeting them” (Morris, 2006). The “you” in Winterbottom’s statement appears to presume a Western audience, already interpolated through a lens of liberal subjectivity. For this audience, the normative behavior of these spontaneous, rebellious, once carefree youth is a revelation that contextualizes their grievability. It is their “ordinary”-ness that engenders a proximity to an idealized liberal subject. As will become even more apparent in my discussion of Taxi, racialized and orientalist discourse prevents most detainees from falling within this framework. What further complicates these dramatizations is that they were not extensively scripted. When asked about the correspondences between the representations and the actual abuses the Tipton Three experienced, Winterbottom revealed that the filming of Guantanamo heavily utilized improvisation to simulate images that appear indexical. The scenes in Camp X-Ray were semiscripted; during production, the filmmaker structured the conditions in Guantanamo, provided direction for the kinds of abuse that occurred at the camp, and let that abuse be replicated with the consent of the actors in order to film the scenes of prisoner abuse. As a docudrama, the film points to the limits of commonsense understandings of the documentary genre, and non-fiction generally as a category. The improvisational staging enabled an emulation of the indexical image. These scenes, despite being dramatizations, satisfy a desire for the positivism in optic perception. Asked further to comment on the dramatic re-enactments of torture, Winterbottom revealed that the actors actually could not take the extent of the abuse the Tipton Three experienced in Guantanamo. By simulating the conditions of violence in Guantanamo,



Toward the Dark Side

545

what we witness in the film is not simply re-enactment, but in fact an enactment in itself, a performance of power. The practices of representing, re-enacting, and conjuring scenes of torture and violence are always complex. Peter Watkins’s Punishment Park (1971) and Rithy Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), for instance, both work with and through the dramatization and performance of violent acts. In the former, a fake documentary, the actors inhabited their roles, improvising much of the story about the cruel, punitive practice of leaving prisoners in the US Southwest desert to fight and escape their way to freedom. In the latter documentary, Khmer prison guards who served as tour guides of abandoned prisons re-enact the very torture scenes they had performed years before in the same halls (Cook, 2009: 109–110; Toker, 2005). Performing the scene of torture or state-sanctioned violence conjures a complex set of questions about “the real” and its representation. In the 1970s, Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment simulated the conditions of imprisonment in order to study the effects of power; Zimbardo (2008) shut the experiment down early, citing real psychological effects that such “simulated” abuse had on the participants. Similarly, after being voluntarily waterboarded, journalist Christopher Hitchens (2008) noted symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder from the trauma of water torture. What we see in Road to Guantanamo is neither simply acting, nor an examplar of the indexical. Rather, the images are both simulacra and affective actuality for participants, filmed to emulate documentary style that visually suggests an indexical bind. Thus, the category docudrama inadequately describes the way a sensibility about how “real” images should look informs Guantanamo’s aesthetic structure, chosen by Winterbottom for maximum emotional impact.

Seeing inside Camp X-Ray Road to Guantanamo attempts to translate detainee pain to the viewer and render “visible” that which is entirely outside of public visibility – social life in the GTMO detention center – exemplified by its treatment of the Tipton Three’s time at Camp X-Ray. Unlike the notorious visibility of other US military detention centers like the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, GTMO detainees are only visualizable through a few images, as there has been no comparable exposé of prisoner abuse through photography or video. While many of the techniques of torture in Iraq were inspired by practices in Guantanamo, the images of violence in Abu Ghraib do not stand in for the absent and unseen bodies of GTMO detainees (White, 2005). South Asian and Middle Eastern bodies, (particularly in the post-9/11 context) blur together as racial others, rendering specific iterations of violence bereft of context. The “visibility” of GTMO detainees initially relied both on numbers – for example, the ability to note that 779 men were detained in Guantanamo at different points since 2002, but as of June 2014, that number declined to 149 – and a few pictures of men in orange jumpsuits.2 On January 13, 2002, after being captured by coalition forces, Asif and Shafiq were transferred to Guantanamo Bay from the Sheberghan prison. The film’s treatment of the transfer is ominous. Close-up shots show the boys are forcefully

546

Anjali Nath

shaved, photographed for identification, paraded naked and hooded, and dressed in sensory-deprivation gear for their flight. The transformation is striking: from bodies given narrative coherence as familiar characters within a liberal Western framework, they become disrobed figures, re-costumed in outfits designed to suppress a subject’s personhood. They are the visual appearance of what Giorgio Agamben theorized as the “homo sacer” – the human-like figure, denied civil life and public grievability. The mournful string-based score croons with the anticipation of what we know is inevitable: the journey (or road) to the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay. This short segment metaphorically captures the gist of the entire film’s narrative trajectory; characters realize their inevitable terrible fate as detainees. They are stripped of their clothing, and subjugated as other-than-human. As they are loaded into the airbus for transport, the re-enactments of their journey are interwoven with contemporary news footage. We see images of rows of men in orange suits lining the innards of the military aircraft. These move seamlessly through archival media clips that include news announcements about the arrival of more detainees to GTMO and press statements by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President George Bush. As the newscaster narrates his segment, the image track shows the exterior of Camp X-Ray, the landing of a plane in what is presumed to be Cuba, a guard peering out from a watchtower, and a few anonymous men shuffled around in orange suits. The news segment then smoothly integrates into the reenacted interior of Guantanamo, the performance of the repression (Figure 25.2). The news images evoke a familiar sense of history and place, the mania of the post9/11 moment: a broadcast that if not exactly recognized by the viewer, certainly invokes a particular time through unmistakable imagery.

Figure 25.2  Camp X-Ray re-enactment, Road to Guantanamo (Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom, 2006, produced by Film4, Revolution Films, and Screen West Midlands).



Toward the Dark Side

547

The segment ends with a dramatized image of Shafiq and Asif kneeling amongst other detainees, fitted in orange jumpsuits and wearing sensory deprivation gear. The segment conjures the most iconic of GTMO images: a photograph of rows of incarcerated individuals, framed by chain-link fences, fatigue-clad men standing above them, perhaps the most enduring image from Guantanamo, taken by Navy Petty Officer Shane McCoy on the first day detainees were brought to GTMO (Rosenberg, 2008). Unlike other military prisons such as the Abu Ghraib facility in Iraq, at the time of the film’s release there were very few GTMO pictures circulating in the media, resulting from strict limitations on picture taking at the base. Accordingly, McCoy’s images from that day have been used and re-used by large news agencies like the BBC, the New York Times, and CNN. Government regulation on photography in Guantanamo thus framed what the public was allowed to see and imagine about the military facility. Road to Guantanamo’s reenactment of this image evokes Shafiq and Asif ’s stories as contextualized within a particular public and shared post-9/11 visual history. By revealing these orangesuited subjects as our main characters, the film thus recontextualizes this well-known image of Camp X-Ray. This distance between the interior and exterior occurs at a myriad of levels, visualizable within this representation of the aptly named Camp X-Ray. The appearance of the chain-link fence in McCoy’s photograph gives the impression of peering “into” Camp X-Ray, rendering visceral the audience’s penetrative gaze into a largely nonvisible locale. Yet, even such a penetrative gaze is met with the limits of visibility – what are we looking at? The detainees are covered from view by the sensory-deprivation gear, kneeling in stress positions designed to produce emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion. In other words, we are looking at torture. Yet, the torture we view is not immediately available to the viewer as such, as it is not a spectacular form of violence that somehow becomes obvious to the onlooker. While this penetrative gaze into Camp X-Ray may provide a view “into” Guantanamo, the bodies themselves remain out of view, and the methods of torture are specifically non-spectacular. The subjects are unrecognizable as human, and the bodily identification with their pain remains ungraspable, out of view. Such a portrait recalls what Akira Mizuta Lippit (2005) defines as the avisual – the image revealing two orders of invisibility, that hidden from view (and perceptible by X-ray), and that which is beyond perception (the experiential aspects of torture). Such a nefarious positing of X-ray’s double meaning here, as both dark geography and Lippit’s analytic metaphor, makes clear the ways in which this scene appeals to multiple logics of visibilities and invisibilities to situate Road to Guantanamo’s moment of invocation.3 By using this iconic image of Guantanamo, the scene represents the familiar through an entirely different narrative trajectory. The characters’ transformations from road-tripping young men into the subjects of the familiar Camp X-Ray photograph destabilizes the way the image reads. This intervention engenders empathy in the viewer by rendering the detainees as legible and relatable characters. As such, the moment of Shafiq and Asif ’s transformations into recognizable detainees presents the confluence of dual impulses: the transmission of ordinary youngsters into an

548

Anjali Nath

overdetermined cultural category and the concomitant destabilization of this category as Other. In other words, the critique of necropower depends entirely on the negation of Mamdani’s anti-modern subject and the according recuperation into a liberal framework. These young men are legible to the West, making their torture and imprisonment incomprehensible.

Taxi to the Dark Side Like Road to Guantanamo, Alex Gibney’s Acadamy Award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side uses a detainee story to provide a critique of militarized imprisonment. This film narrates the story of a young Afghan taxi driver, known only as Dilawar of Yakubi, who was picked up by coalition forces in Afghanistan and held until his murder at the Bagram military detention center. Dilawar was under US custody at the time of his death and was found with his wrists chained to the ceiling of his cell and contusions on his extremities. The film, which as Julia Lesage points out, has a “detective story structure” in which the audience discovers evidence, aided by a modest amount of explanatory voice-over narration, presents interviews, declassified government materials (including images of military detention and redacted documents), animated intertitles, re-enactments, and press coverage to tell Dilawar’s story (Lesage, 2009). Taxi offers a reading of the Global War on Terror through recounting the torturous conditions that resulted in Dilawar’s death. When Taxi to the Dark Side won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary, it beat two other war documentaries (No End in Sight, Charles Ferguson, and Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, Richard Robbins), Michael Moore’s Sicko on the failing healthcare system in America, and War/Dance, a film about music and dance in the context of Ugandan civil strife (Andrea and Sean Fine, 2007). Significantly, three of the five nominated films dealt with Bush-Cheney era foreign policies, and Moore’s dealt with their domestic policy failures. While most documentaries may not garner widespread distribution and are not consumed with the same fervor as blockbuster fiction films, they represent an important market; documentary films are often understood to possess a social justice imperative, as illustrated by the history of Academy Award nominations for overtly political films within the documentary category. Coupled with documentary’s limited marketability, director Alex Gibney complained Taxi was not met with success at the box office due to mishandling by the distribution company (Lyons, 2008). Nevertheless, Taxi’s accolades, its availability on Netflix (both as a DVD and for a period of time via Instant Stream), and its purchase and broadcast on HBO make it an important cultural document that has circulated to a wide variety of audiences, especially in the United States (Goodman, 2008). Taxi thus enters Dilawar’s fateful death into three sites of imprisonment in the US-led Global War on Terror. By exploring the linkages between prison abuse at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and at the Bagram Air Base, Taxi to the Dark Side situates Dilawar’s maltreatment as indicative of systematic torture practices in the post-9/11 US military prison archipelago. Much of the film concentrates on detailing the



Toward the Dark Side

549

conditions that produced his death, excavating this story through interviews, (sometimes redacted) documentation, news articles, and photographs. Whereas Winterbottom’s Road to Guantanamo relies on the narrativization of the Tipton Three as modern (and British) subjects, reframing a perceived threat as misunderstood mischief via the road movie genre from the outset, the visual strategies through which Taxi explores Dilawar’s personhood radically differ. Marked by both his absence and the absence of most forms of documentation that would enunciate the conditions of his life and death, how does Taxi to the Dark Side work to construct Dilawar as a grievable subject? Who was Dilawar? Known only by one name, he was captured in life by grainy photographs in the Afghan countryside and in death by high-resolution army cameras. Dilawar was taken into custody after driving two men in his taxi who were accused of launching a rocket into a US military base. It was later found that the attack had been staged by local Afghan forces and the two men were framed. Dilawar, thus, as a victim of the US-led Global War on Terror is the literal embodiment of Mbembe’s necropolitical subject, his freedom and eventually life taken away as an unruly subject of the American empire. Dilawar cannot speak from inside his own death, so how does Taxi mobilize the visual, text, and other circumstances of his life to explicate unjust demise (Felman, 1991)?

Dilawar’s body The film opens with establishing shots of the Afghan countryside, introducing the town of Yakubi. The very first image is a mountainous terrain, punctuated by the silhouette of a helicopter and the ominous humming of its blades that sonically spill over into the next few images of misty farmland. The first person to speak is presumably a family member, although not introduced as such. This itself is worthy of some pause – hailing from a farming community, this interviewee remains an unnamed Afghan whose ­testimony narrates the landscape of Yakubi. Unlike other interviewed subjects in the film, he is not a journalist, military official, politician, or lawyer. Without a legitimizing professional association he does not merit introduction, a move which reproduces a binary between subjects who are able to articulate themselves as modern (and thus human) and those who are not. “Dilawar was a quiet and hard-working person, a good and honest man,” he says, according to the film’s subtitled translations. Adding a few more details that accompany a short montage of old photographs of Dilawar, the man’s testimony, while painful in its minimalist description of his life, is also untethered to any sense of impact of his death on the community or on him individually. Thus, even as this anonymous Afghan man’s testimony is both heard and translated, without ­context (or, without speaking directly to Dilawar’s death), he is merely part of the ­establishing landscape. The absence of identifying markers for this nameless Afghan interviewee unintentionally reproduces Dilawar’s virtual indecipherability and establishes him outside of the normative Western subject. Dilawar’s body appears visually in three distinct forms through Taxi. In Bagram, we also see his processing mug shot (Figure  25.3) and most poignantly a simple

550

Anjali Nath

Figure 25.3  Dilawar of Yakubi mugshot, Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007, produced by Discovery Channel, Jigsaw Productions, Tall Woods, Wider Film Projects, and X-Ray Productions).

Figure 25.4  Dilawar of Yakubi pre-detention photograph, Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007, produced by Discovery Channel, Jigsaw Productions, Tall Woods, Wider Film Projects, and X-Ray Productions).

posthumous drawing done by Sergeant Thomas Curtis that represented Dilawar’s torturous demise (see below). In his pre-Bagram life, we find him in grainy, faded photographs, likely collected from family and friends (Figure 25.4). Finally, the film also uses the high-resolution pictures taken of Dilawar’s corpse post-autopsy. These



Toward the Dark Side

551

modes of corporeal visibility – through fading family pictures, the unembellished torture illustration, and the official military portraits of his death and imprisonment – are telling of Dilawar’s relation to institutional power. Early pictures were photographed with what appears to be an inexpensive point-and-click camera, while the latter depictions of Dilawar’s body are defined by the dialectic between disclosure and non-disclosure. At the beginning of the film, we are provided a handful of personal photographs of Dilawar before his imprisonment at Bagram. Following establishing shots of Yakubi, these portraits of Dilawar are shown within the first minute of the film. In one photograph, he is squatting with a group of young children, at least two of whom have mischievous smiles on their faces that contrast with Dilawar’s serious countenance. In another, we see a group of young men on a tractor; yet, the film does not specify which young man is Dilawar, which suggests the interchangeability of Afghan men, one being as good as another. In the last photograph, Dilawar stands next to a pile of rocks. This image is accompanied by subtitles from a gentleman (the man presumed to be Dilawar’s relation), who says: “he brought stones down from the mountain, all the stones in this wall,” referring to an edifice being constructed for and by the family on their land. These early images and brief testimony about Dilawar’s work, material legacy, and membership in his community provide the only basis for grieving him for the ways he lived, and not simply the fact he died. Further, these three images of Dilawar are all slightly out of focus, with imprecise features. The prints all appear faintly worn, perhaps exposed to the elements and faded over time, becoming lightly stained or color distorted. As Laura Marks theorizes, the gradual loss of color is part of the image’s ontological being and its relationship with time and the viewer. Marks elaborates on the experiential dimension of the decayed image through the category of haptic experience, rather than optic perception. She writes, “because it does not rely on a separation between looker and object, haptic looking permits identification with (among other things) loss, in the decay and partialness of the image” (Marks, 2002). While the camera’s utopian promise is the embalming of the moment into perpetuity, the image itself has a tenuous life as a material replication of emanated light. The image thus has two interconnected relations to life, first as a material object with a degenerative being (whose decay alludes to the indeterminately deferred life of the represented individual), and second as a material object in circulation in social space that is a marker of what is absent. Put differently, the photograph’s representation (and capture) of the past moment as well as its own tenuous life and degradation both connect it intimately with death and the ephemeral. Performing a recession of Dilawar’s disappeared body into memory, these images evanesce through time. Dilawar’s family pictures are thus haunted not simply by the marker of his absence but in the way the fading surface feels to the eyes’ touch – distant, vague, irretrievable. In these early pictures, he is thus marked as a ghostly presence in the film. The only other live pictures of Dilawar are shown shortly thereafter in the film. In a makeshift military mugshot, we see his portrait and profile against hand-drawn height measurements on the wall; he wears an orange jumpsuit, a folder held out in front of him with his prisoner ID number written in marker to

552

Anjali Nath

Figure 25.5  Sergeant Thomas Curtis’s drawing of Dilawar, December 2, 2002, Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007, produced by Discovery Channel, Jigsaw Productions, Tall Woods, Wider Film Projects, and X-Ray Productions).

identify him. The mugshot as a genre of photography has criminalization inscribed into its composition; viewers are conditioned to read the subjects of such photos as likely unruly bodies, unwillingly caught and submitted for incarceration. A day after Dilawar’s death, Sgt. Curtis was asked to document how the subject had been shackled leading up to his passing. He took a piece of paper and drew a quick sketch elucidating the position of standing torture ultimately fatal for Dilawar (Figure 25.5). The illustration is unadorned, a simple silhouette with little artistic rendering. Similar to the aesthetic of elementary school drawings, the quick sketch represents a body in thick, rectangular strokes. There are no feet, and only quick circles for hands. Since the subject is hooded, the imprecision of the drawing allows for perspectival indeterminacy: is it a frontal depiction, or from behind? The subject’s rectangular legs are shackled and his arms are above his head in a V-formation, attached to the ceiling with squiggly lines representing handcuffs. This drawing is the pre-eminent artifact documenting the abuse that lead to Dilawar’s death. Significantly, early in the film, Sgt. Curtis remarks on Dilawar’s pre-detention photo: “I saw his picture in the New York Times article. Before that picture, I couldn’t have picked his face out. You know, my memory of him was chained up, with a hood on, no sleeping.” That Sgt. Curtis drew this picture from memory is telling; Dilawar was available to his view only as a hooded, shackled subject – a racial and cultural other. While his personhood was unrecognizable, he was immediately understood as a subject teetering between conditions of life and death, his body available for manipulation, punishment, and torture by Sgt. Curtis’s army mates. What makes this drawing particularly haunting is the aesthetic similitude it bears with the drawings made in children’s art classes; the simplicity of the lines, the



Toward the Dark Side

553

two-dimensional representation, the ability to “see” what would have been hidden from view (like the back of the handcuff) evoke the schematic stage in children’s artistic development (Atkinson, 1991). The illustrated ankle cuffs cutting through Dilawar’s legs and the hood on his head only add to the perspectival confusion as to whether we see the back or front of Dilawar’s body. To be sure, I am not suggesting a critique of Sgt. Curtis’s artistic capabilities here, but instead offer that the childlike aesthetic of the torture illustration makes it all the more eerie. The drawing is stylistically associated with an imagination that is innocent and youthful, but also is unsophisticated and two-dimensional, rendering Dilawar through simplified perspectives of the body, in multiple senses. This incommensurate juxtaposition between the innocence the aesthetic evokes and the macabre reality it represents is striking, gesturing towards the way modern torture techniques themselves have become harder to discern, as discussed earlier with the images from Camp X-Ray. Gibney uses this image throughout Taxi, to invoke the upright torture position that lead to Dilawar’s death. Thus, in the film the image becomes a signifier for Dilawar’s absent body, the drawing collapses onto his real body as the only material artifact of his torture. Early in the film as the narrator describes the facts of Dilawar’s case, with shots from the military investigation archive, depicting re-enacted images from Dilawar’s death scene. In one picture, a soldier in beige camouflage is shackled and lying on the floor, his face fallen in an attempt to accurately depict the body after it was taken down from the ceiling. In death, we meet Dilawar through his autopsy pictures. Early in the film, after introducing context for the Afghan war, we are shown pictures taken from Dilawar’s military file. Spread out on the medical examiner’s table, his corpse is naked and expressed in high-resolution detail of the camera used for forensic military investigation. The impulse to capture and document here presents us with precise outer surfaces of Dilawar’s skin, the bruising along his legs that indicated the internal bleeding that eventually led to his death. We see the exterior articulation of his injuries and his pallid, inanimate face. This most highly realized form of indexical similitude – the ability to see and witness his corpse – corresponds more to governmental bureaucratic practices than to a sympathetic rendering of his grievability. Of the images that document Dilawar’s life, this bears the most indexical verisimilitude, that would seem to capture an “actuality” most closely. And indeed, it does evidence his death in painful detail. He is absent, dead, and pictured in the standard post-mortem photograph: we even see the autopsy stitches in V-formation across his chest. It may be Dilawar, but it tells us nothing of how he lived, suffered, or thought, nor does it challenge the racial logics that suggest some are more human than others.

Conclusion Both Road to Guantanamo and Taxi pivot around questions of how lives are constructed as grievable through cinematic practice, and work to undo commonsense perceptions of the Bush-Cheney era by rendering particular cases of detention coherent to Western publics. And yet both films as well rely on modern racialized

554

Anjali Nath

notions of subjectivity to animate detainees as grievable subjects. But such ­representational practices do work multifariously; while Road to Guantanamo’s extensive use of re-enactment begets questions about the performance of violence, such footage enables strategic visual interventions into the way in which detainees are systematically denied social life. Such images are able to conjure a social world that rejects the moral authority of state violence. Further, Road to Guantanamo’s use of re-enactment instead of live action footage provides an interesting dual tension, refuting the camera’s eye as positivistic proof, while simultaneously appealing to the aesthetic appearance and sensory experience of watching a documentary. The film’s use of non-professional actors, hand-held cameras, and improvisation alongside interviews with the Tipton Three creates a portrait entrenched in evocation of affect, the vicissitudes of citizenship, and the traumatic memories of incarceration. Ultimately, however, the use of visual and narrative conventions lends itself easily to Road to Guantanamo; the Tipton Three are comprehensible to the audience as British subjects. Fears about immigrant others notwithstanding, they speak in English, make silly jokes, rap and freestyle to pass the time, and their body ­language is recognizably masculine gender normative in a Western context. By contrast, Taxi’s protagonist Dilawar’s life is unrepresentable. The film pieces together the conditions that produced his death, but the loss of his life remains difficult to comprehend and ultimately untranslatable to the audience. The only family ­ member to testify to his existence as a person grieved by other people remains nameless and unidentified, and the few fuzzy photographs identifying him are already marked with loss. Despite the ways these films showcase the brutalities of the US-led Global War on Terror, the Tipton Three and Dilawar are used to narrate anxieties about American exceptionalism rather than enunciating the conditions of detention and the genealogies of the racial state that produced them. Each film recounts specific stories of detainee life in order to interrogate the political destination of America in the wake of the Bush-Cheney War on Terror policies. To return to an earlier point, the notion of movement each title invokes also gestures toward the War on Terror’s new carceral diasporas of rendered and detained people. The road to detention facilities was involuntary; Dilawar and the Tipton Three were picked up against their will and contained in military facilities, their bodies manipulated to produce experiences of pain. Though the films may be unable to escape American exceptionalist logic, their titles may ominously reveal a truth about these War on Terror practices: passage is an exercise in power, with forced movements and containment structures the conditions of imprisoned life and death.

Notes 1 The Tipton Three were played by actors who had not at that point had professional experience acting. Since Road to Guantanamo, Riz Ahmed (who played Shafiq Rasul) pursued an acting career and has scored parts in both TV and film.



Toward the Dark Side

555

2 In 2006, the Department of Defense released a list of detainee names, and in the years since the government has released more documents on Guantanamo Bay in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act. These documents are included in the New York Times and NPR collaborative research project “The Guantanamo Docket” which houses many of the detainee documents online. Wikileaks also has a Guantanamo Detainee site, including basic documents about each prisoner. See “List of Individuals Detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba from January 2002 through May 15, 2006,” http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/operation_and_plans/Detainee/detaineesFOIAre lease15May2006.pdf; “The Guantanamo Docket,” http://projects.nytimes.com/guanta namo; Wikileaks, “Gitmo Files,” http://wikileaks.org/gitmo/ (all three sites accessed August 7, 2014). 3 Nora Alter’s essay in this volume (Chapter 20) also elaborates on the in/visibility of the image.

References Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge. American Civil Liberty Union (2014) Guantánamo by the Numbers. ACLU, https://www. aclu.org/guantanamo-numbers, accessed August 17, 2014. Atkinson, D. (1991) How Children Use Drawing. Journal of Art & Design Education, 10(1), 57–72. BBC (2006) Web “First” for Guantanamo Film. BBC, February 13, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/ hi/entertainment/4708148.stm, accessed August 7, 2014. Begg, M. (2006) My Years in Captivity. The Guardian, February 24, http://www.theguardian. com/world/2006/feb/25/guantanamo.bookextracts, accessed August 10, 2014. Butler, J. (2006) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso. Butler, J. (2010) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso. Crenshaw, K. and Peller, G. (1995) Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York: The New Press. Cook, J. (2009) Gaming the System: Peter Watkins’ The Gladiators and Punishment Park. Science Fiction Film and Television, 2(1), 105–113. Corera, G. (2008) Guantanamo “a Stain on US Military.” BBC, December 2, http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/americas/7761315.stm, accessed August 7, 2014. Dayan, C. (2011) The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Felman, S. (1991) In an Era of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Yale French Studies, 79, 39–81. Gaines, J. (2007) The Production of Outrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 48(2), 36–55. Goodhart, B. (n.d.) Michael Winterbottom on The Road to Guantánamo (interview). Channel 4, http://www.film4.com/special-features/interviews/michael-winterbottom-onthe-road-to-guantanomo, accessed August 7, 2014. Goodman, A. (2008) Taxi to the Dark Side. Truthdig.com, February 27, http://www.truthdig. com/report/item/20080227_taxi_to_the_dark_side/, accessed August 7, 2014. Gordon, A. (2006) Abu Ghraib: Imprisonment and the War on Terror. Race & Class, 48(1), 42–59.

556

Anjali Nath

Haraway, D. (1988) Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Hesford, W. (2011) Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hitchens, C. (2008) Believe Me, It’s Torture. Vanity Fair, August, http://www.vanityfair.com/ politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808, accessed August 7, 2014. Kennicott, P. (2006) MPAA Rates Poster an F. Washington Post, May 17, http://www.washington post.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/16/AR2006051601910.html, accessed August 7, 2014. Lesage, J. (2009) Torture Documentaries. Jump Cut, 51, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/ jc51.2009/TortureDocumentaries/text.html, accessed August 7, 2014. Lippit, A. (2005) Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lutz, C. (2009) Introduction. In Lutz (ed.) The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts, pp. 1–46. New York: New York University Press. Lyons, C. (2008) Filmmaker Says Distributor Failed Him. New York Times, June 26, http:// www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/movies/26thin.html?_r=0, accessed August 7, 2014. Marks, L. (2002) Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mamdani, M. (2005) Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Random House. Mbembe, A. (2003) Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40. Miller, P. (2006) The Road To Guantanamo: Guided Terror Tour of US Atrocity Culture. WBAI, New York Pacifica Radio. Morris, N. (2006) Horrors of Camp Delta are Exposed by British Victims. The Independent, February 22, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/horrors-of-campdelta-are-exposed-by-british-victims-467356.html, accessed August 7, 2014. Nichols, B. (1991) Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nichols, B. (2008) Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject. Critical Inquiry, 35(1), 72–89. Paglen, T. (2010) Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. New York: Penguin. Rosenberg, C. (2008) Photos Echo Years Later. Miami Herald, January 1, http://www.miami herald.com/2008/01/10/v-fullstory/375017/photos-echo-years-later.html, accessed August 7, 2014. Sontag, S. (1977) On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Steyn, J. (2004) Guantanamo Bay: The Legal Black Hole. International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 53(1), 1–15. Toker, L. (2005) S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, Directed by Rithy Panh. American Historical Review, 110(5), 1508–1509. White, J. (2005) Abu Ghraib Tactics Were First Used at Guantanamo. Washington Post, July 14, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/13/AR2005071302380. html, accessed August 7, 2014. Williams, R. (1985) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zimbardo, P. (2008) The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House.

Part IX

Surveillance

Introduction Surveillance

Elizabeth Cowie

Observation is central to both documentary and surveillance, what then is the relation of the world surveyed in documentary to the world surveilled? When and how does the camera’s prosthetic eye enable discursive power? How does contemporary documentary address the gaze, and the being seen of surveillance? In what ways might documentary’s “look back” disturb the disciplining and controlling digital and optical gaze of surveilling? How does our desire to see and be seen engage with the anxiety of surveillance? What is the place of the voice and the heard in surveillance? It is these questions, and the ways in which they have been addressed in contemporary documentary film and video art works, that are discussed here. Surveillance refers to watching, but this watching is not equivalent to looking, rather it is purposeful, it is observation but with the implication of vigilance, whether guarding a prisoner, or to be on one’s guard for oneself, or for a community as a night watchman. We view a landscape, or a painting, but watch a television program or a movie that presents actions and events in time – we watch what is happening, and for something to happen. And while we make observations about the painting that we see, the kind of landscape, the artistry of the painting, in watching moving images we are also anticipating, with specific criteria of expectation, and looking to see what will happen next. Such watching involves being alert to the sounds of danger – of footsteps or creaking floorboards – as well as the sights, but while the surveillance of spying is as much a matter of the heard as the seen, it is the visual that is the focus of current debates and the discussions in this section. The development of audio surveillance, however, may raise much greater concern, for while our faces and actions are not hidden in public spaces (unless for religious or other reasons), we expect to be heard only by those to whom we speak.1 A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

560

Elizabeth Cowie

To watch without being seen was already possible with the development of the telescope, and the large camera obscuras that were installed in the nineteenth century – in Bristol in 1828, Edinburgh in the 1850s, and San Francisco’s Cliff House in 1896 (and 1946) – that allowed groups of people to spy on the movements and actions of those in the adjacent streets or parkland. It was the recorded seen, however, that enabled new forms of surveillance with the hidden camera, aerial photography, and, with the development of video tape, of closed circuit TV. The recorded moving image, nevertheless, was early on rejected as providing evidence; its visual record, while indexical, was not sufficiently veridical, as Patterson and Taylor show in their discussion of 1930s police surveillance footage (2009: 3–9). Being watched has become ubiquitous through visual devices of CCTV, mobile phone camera and video recording, and other forms of identification, such as GPS, as well as the algorithms that track our Internet activities, giving rise to concerns for civil liberties, as well as anxiety about the control afforded by surveillance. But these same technologies also facilitate and enrich our lives, both work and play, by connecting us to friends and family and by recording our life and sharing its sounds and images. We find our way with GPS, and enjoy the convenience of online shopping, and electronic cards for banking, travelling, and so on. Along with state apparatuses, and capitalist firms, ordinary people – you and me – are recording their lives and the world as video-diary, in a form of self-surveillance. Uploaded onto social networking sites, our unguarded exhibition of ourselves to our friends can expose us to a surveilling scrutiny if subsequently made available for others to watch, for example, on YouTube, as unauthorized “candid camera,” or to employers, as is now sometimes required, or as part of a police investigation, as occurred to Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito following the murder of Knox’s flat-mate Meredith Kercher in Italy in 2009. Our video recordings and photographs of our activities can become the material of forensic surveillance, as explored for example in Errol Morris’s film Standard Operating Procedure (2008), discussed by Cowie in Chapter 27. Indeed, the value of CCTV is primarily forensic. Central here is the interpretation of these images, of an analysis that is also a reading, and the ethics of their gathering, which is addressed by Brian Winston in Chapter 28. We may become recorders of “life caught unawares,” photographically like Dziga Vertov and Cartier-Bresson, or using Microsoft’s SenseCam, a wearable computer/ camera, that can produce a personal record of everything we encounter.2 An earlier type of wearable sensor camera with fisheye lenses was developed by Steve Mann, as a project of “sousveillance,” the term he introduced to designate inverse surveillance in situations of organized surveillance, a juxtaposition that “generates new kinds of information” (Mann, Nolan, and Wellman, 2003: 333). Catfish begins as a videodiary and becomes surveillance, demonstrating the seductions and deceits possible in Facebook’s social networking that engage us in the visual, and the making visible (discussed in Cowie’s chapter). Patrik Sjöberg’s essay, Chapter 29, develops this concept in relation to the veiled, hidden face and voice, censored by the participant, arguing that “we could regard acts of sousveillance as any deliberate act to change or draw attention to the dynamics of surveillance situations,” by detecting, avoiding,

Introduction 561 and subverting surveillance technologies. The point of departure for his discussion is the anonymous interview in documentary works, and the contexts which give rise to the wish on the part of participants to be unidentifiable or unrecognizable. In observing, however, we organize meaning about what we have seen and cognized in relation to specific criteria and gather what is thus indentified as “information.” Gary Marx, examining the role of surveys, suggests that academic social researchers and their “brethren” in what he terms the “discovery business” – market researchers, investigative reporters, police, private detectives, national security agents and, of course, documentary filmmakers – are surely more spies than spied upon, even if for academics this is usually in benign contexts. We all seek to find things out about others which they may, or may not, wish to reveal and which may hurt, harm, help, or be irrelevant to them – whether as individuals or more indirectly as group members. (Marx, 2008)

It is the role of documentary and documentary film studies in the “discovery” business that Winston addresses in his essay. Of course, as Marx acknowledges, all these information hunter/gatherers are also subject to being watched, as citizen, consumer, communicator, and employee. Locating people and their activities is not a contemporary phenomenon, for citizens have long been “tracked” – identified and registered for taxation, for payment in kind whether in laboring or soldiering, or for other purposes. Clergy began recording baptisms, marriages, and burials in England in 1538, a practice that became required by law in 1837, and shortly thereafter the first national population census was undertaken in 1841. Similar requirements arose throughout Europe, North America, and elsewhere. The collecting of information through any technology becomes a feared “surveillance” only when it is viewed as ethically problematic or socially invasive, which arises, Marx argues, when the means are coercive, secret, involuntary, and passive and involve harm, risk, or other costs to the subject – whether during the data collection process or in subsequent uses, particularly when there is no formal juridical or policy review and when the playing field is inequitably tilted. (Marx, 2008)

We can choose to give information, whether through interviews for market research, or to filmmakers, as Winston explores, while we have agreed to give our information about our purchases when we accept the rewards of supermarket “loyalty” discount points. Our Internet searches – ostensibly free – provide valuable and marketable information that pays for our use of search engines, but whose capture, and use, is less transparent. DPI (deep packet inspection) is a form of Internet surveillance made possible by Internet Service Providers because it enables the collection, observation, analysis, and sometimes storage of data in relation to “Internet packets,” parcels of data sent across a computer network; a recent analysis is provided by Christian Fuchs (2012).

562

Elizabeth Cowie

David Lyon defines modern surveillance as “the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection or direction.” (Lyon, 2006: 14). Key questions thus arise, firstly, of who owns, or controls, or can make money from our data; secondly, of how locatable and identifiable are the subjects of data collection, and by whom, for information that is personal and intimate could also be stigmatizing, or open the person to deception, or instead it might be vital for it to be known by the person, such as biologically predictive information. If it is a permanent record, does the person have the right to access it or remove it? For such data can significantly aid in developing new social policies or  medical interventions. This is the topic of Phantom Documentary – Disease Surveillance System, a promotional documentary made by the Indian film company, Yash Raj Films, but set in Pakistan, explaining the need for the monitoring of hepatitis C, which is a major killer, especially in the rural areas. Commencing with a young man and only son’s funeral, medical experts attest to the need for information by the healthcare system and the state, and thus the value of the Phantom system developed by DiagnosisOne, a US-based medical technology firm specializing in “bringing medical management to point-of-care with real-time data, CDS and analytics.”3 It is propaganda, in the Griersonian sense, of persuasion in the public interest, like Housing Problems (1935) and Enough to Eat (1936), of the need to collect and share information efficiently, in order to make the world a better place. But it also advertises DiagnosisOne’s products, presented in a modern Asian hospital whose location is only indicated at the end, with the Pakistan flag, thus marketing the film’s message more widely. Central to the issue of information gathering is the notion of privacy, and the relation of the private to the public. Privacy is a modern idea and expectation, namely, of what is not part of or available within the public sphere; the private marks not what is hidden or secret (though it may be) but a boundary and limit to the availability of certain kinds of information, or knowledge in “the public” or “national” interest. The regulation of information about ourselves that is not freely or knowingly given is thus held to be a matter for governments, raising the question of the extent to which the state is democratic, and is perceived in general to be benign, open, and transparent, or on the contrary, persecutory, closed, and secretive. Moreover, the question now arises: is the Internet a public or private space? Is it like a phone or mail service? Or is it a café or shop? Clearly it is both, raising a need not only for new forms of regulation, but also new ways of understanding how personal information is now defined by Internet users as private or public, and our expectations about the boundaries defining these, in relation to commercial and state interests. The installation of CCTV in public spaces by local or state governments is a gathering of information in the public interest that is not necessarily available to individuals or organizations or firms. Phone tapping or interception of mail in most democracies – including the United States and United Kingdom – is illegal and normally requires state organizations such as the police to acquire a court order. In each case, the record and its information is subject to specific constraints of use. The revelations in 2013 by Edward Snowden, in leaked documents acquired by him as a

Introduction 563 former worker with the CIA and National Security Agency, of metadata surveillance by the US and UK governments, exposed the extent to which digital data is not covered by existing regulation. It is watching as benignly protective that is presented in National Geographic’s 52-minute film, Inside the FBI (2003), which never questions the surveillance used. We follow HAZ-MAT special agents as they extract samples from a mail delivery contaminated with anthrax spores and go behind the scenes with counter-terrorist teams who work to protect a crowd of nearly 60,000 people at a major sporting event. We get a privileged glimpse inside the FBI’s international operations and meet some of the key operatives in the battle against terrorism. All this is supplemented with a detailed and intriguing review of the history of the Bureau and some of its controversial moments.

In contrast Emile de Antonio, in his film Mr. Hoover and I (1989), addresses the absurdities and viciousness of the surveillance machine that J. Edgar Hoover created as head of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, for the FBI was established not only as a Federal investigative body but also as an internal intelligence agency. Absurdities, in the 10,000 pages of documents on him that De Antonio discovered that the FBI held, “stuff untrue and invented,” or true but missing the joke, such as his reply to a friend – duly recorded ‒ that he would like to grow up “to be an eggplant.” Parodying this, he films, for the record, his hair being cut by his wife. The viciousness, de Antonio narrates, is apparent in the FBI’s pursuit of actress Jean Seberg. As both essay-film and autobiography,  the work’s form is dialectical, enacting a conversation between  two orders of documenting ‒ de Antonio’s and  Hoover’s, for, as de Antonio declares, “I am the ultimate document” – appearing as “found” material in his own film as well as the FBI’s records. As a result he challenges us as spectators, Jonathan Rosenbaum argues, “not only to think but to think for ourselves” (2006: 341). It is such critique of surveillance in contemporary documentary that is the central concern of the essays here. The watchers are watched, however, through human rights organizations, and especially through the World Wide Web, which is host to many valuable sites that inform us about these debates, and new developments in surveillance, such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a not for profit organization based at City University, London, and funded by private donation (see: www.thebureauinvestigates. com, and  also, besides YouTube and Vimeo, http://watchdocumentary.com, http://­counterinformation.wordpress.com/documentaries/, http://peopleforfreedom. com, http://nwoobserver.wordpress.com, http://www.opendemocracy.net, www. observingsurveillance.org., and www.trackedinamerica.org/). This activist work is not directly considered in this section, instead it is addressed through the examination of works that draw on the findings of such agencies, to develop a critical engagement both with the issues raised and with the lived experience of surveillance. The essays here address the role of “observation” (Winston and Cowie), and Michel Foucault’s concept of the “panoptic society,” drawn from the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham’s prison architecture (Cowie, Lin Tay, Sjöberg), in order to address

564

Elizabeth Cowie

distinct forms of documentary and issues of watching and hearing. In Chapter 26, Sharon Lin Tay addresses the gap between the promise and the reality of surveillance technologies, arguing that this is the consequence of two different understandings of, and contexts for, surveillance, of on the one hand the panoptic of Michel Foucault’s disciplinary societies, and on the other hand the protocols of the World Wide Web that Gilles Deleuze argues has given rise to societies of control. She then explores, by way of discussing conventional, digital, and participatory documentary practices, the pleasures and politics of network culture and its protocols that facilitates systems of mapping, tracking, and surveilling, and which suggest new ways of control but also their subversion. For, she demonstrates, networks are viral and open, enabling web-based digital creative practices working with the protocols of network culture that engage surveillance practices to produce alternative aesthetic forms and pleasures. Elizabeth Cowie (Chapter 27) argues that what is central for Foucault in the idea of the Panopticon is not the looking, but an observing that makes the world visible in an organization of the seen through specific criteria that constitute the knowability of the world, but at the same time are norms of, and normalize, behavior. She follows Lin Tay in drawing on Foucault’s concept of genealogy, using his distinction between connaissance as “objective” and a savoir that enables “perspectival knowledge,” and thus a different way of looking. She relates this to Jacques Rancière’s concepts of a “distribution of the sensible,” of the knowable across the senses, and of “dissensus,” of a process of fissuring of the sensible order that opens to seeing, and thinking, otherwise. She asks: how might documentary savoir be undertaken in relation to surveillance activities? In what ways can the aesthetic experience of documentary disturb the distribution of the sensible? Brian Winston (Chapter 28) examines the role of video as forensic evidence, and as the evidential, and asks, can it be trusted? The expectation – and desire – of forensics is for incontrovertible evidence, but the visual record can never simply provide this, Winston argues, both because of the technology, and because the evidence requires a process of reading and interpretation, as he shows in his discussion of the Rodney King tape and trials. The problem of the evidential in documentary is explored in relation to a key ethnographic film, The Ax Fight (1975), which presents its film recording raw, and then reflexively with commentary and analysis. But, just as in the case of the King tape, it is what is not recorded that must also be narrativized. Surveillance, he argues, is a necessary for realist documentary, but also “creative treatment,” a story, an analysis, just as much as the forensic. In his discussion of The Bridge (2007), Winston explores the ethics of documentary’s surveillance, and finds it wanting in this film for, he argues, it “explains nothing”; it does not extend our understanding of suicide, or the issue of Golden Gate Bridge as site of suicide and the failure to erect barriers to prevent these. The ethics of what documentary should show us, or not, and the kinds of understanding it enables, are also addressed by Sjöberg in Chapter 29 in his consideration of the desire for anonymity, to be veiled, while nevertheless “speaking out” and being heard, raising questions, again, of “public interest” versus the right to

Introduction 565 privacy. It may not now be the visual that is central to surveillance, but instead the digital, which on the World Wide Web, and through our smart cards and other devices, can track and watch us much more effectively, as Lin Tay emphasizes. Such tracking is not visible, it has to be thought, imagined, just as the Panopticon’s prisoner must imagine the prison warder’s unseen gaze. For it is as gaze that we imaginatively engage with our fears, our hopes, and our desires to see and know, and to be seen and known. This is documented in the interstices of our discussions in these essays.

Notes 1 Audio surveillance in public spaces is uncommon, although it is operative in St Pancras railway station, London, and is now being installed on buses in Baltimore and San Francisco, and planned for other cities: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/12/ public-bus-audio-surveillance/, accessed August 8, 2014. Questions about security arise, however, since the IP audio-video systems can be accessed remotely. 2 The SenseCam is a pendant computer/camera with fisheye lens and sensors for changes in light or movement that triggers the camera to take still images. Its role has been as a memory-machine, a visual record for “lifelogging.” However, its still images have proved important for people with impaired memory in triggering “Proustian moments” of recollection of events in the past not normally accessible. 3 The short documentary is viewable at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2jfQ1LgQFk, accessed August 8, 2014. DiagnosisOne became Alere Analytics in 2013.

References Fuchs, Christian (2012) Implications of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) Internet Surveillance for Society. Research paper, Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University. Lyon, David (2006) Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond. London: Routledge. Mann, Steve, Nolan, Jason, and Wellman, Barry (2003) Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments. Surveillance and Society, 1(3), 331–355. Marx, Gary T. (2008) Surveys and Surveillance. In Conrad, F. and Schrober, M. (eds.) Envisioning the Survey Interview of the Future, pp. 254–266. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Patterson, James and Taylor, James (2009) Police Filming English Streets in 1935: The Limits of Mediated Identification. Surveillance and Society, 6(1), 3–9. Rosenbaum, Jonathan (2000) The Life and file of an Anarchist Filmmaker (1990). In Kellner, Douglas and Streible, Daniel G. (eds.) Emile de Antonio: A Reader. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota.

26

Architectures of Control and Points of Resistance Surveillance Culture and Digital Documentaries Sharon Lin Tay

In Erasing David (2009), David Bond explores the inexorable intrusion of contemporary surveillance culture as he unsuccessfully attempts to remove traces of his existence, disappear from records, and evade two private investigators he had hired to track him down. A documentary to test the possibility of avoiding being traced given contemporary surveillance technologies, the film shows how surveillance culture is expanded through electronic equipment, originally developed for military purposes, and now being sold to the civilian population in order to extend the market for the security industry. A scene in Erasing David documents the introduction of surveillance equipment into British schools, where the rhetoric of efficiency and safety is used to justify electronic devices to monitor attendance, movement, and the lunch queue. A similar account is presented by Annette Fuentes in her book Lockdown High, on the use of surveillance equipment in schools in the United States, where she describes the ways in which the security industry persuades schools to spend from their budgets and federal grants on surveillance devices. Using the Columbine High School massacre, and later, the 9/11 terrorist attacks as cautionary tales, the security industry presents head teachers with an impossible dilemma: either adopt security measures or risk another violent tragedy on your watch (Fuentes, 2011: 134). The industry’s relentless search for business opportunities has led effectively to the criminalization of civilians by proliferating the use of surveillance technology in civil life, leading to the assumption that human behavior requires constant monitoring by the authorities. In short, it has led to a world where Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century prison system is writ large. As Fuentes observes, schools, especially those for troubled or effectively disenfranchised children and those that are outsourced to private providers, bear a striking resemblance to prison A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



Architectures of Control and Points of Resistance

567

systems when these schools unquestioningly adopt the use of surveillance equipment trained on young people (2011: 77–78, 89). The security industry’s promise to reduce crime rates with the use of surveillance technology in civilian life has not necessarily been realized. It is particularly worth noting the discrepancy between the security utopia that is promised and the reality of the state of “security” after installation of said security measures. Sean Hier, for example, in his book on the use of CCTV in Canada, is concerned to document “the shifting rationalizations for maintaining systems once in place and the implications that organizational design processes pose for applications and uses.” In his introduction he deftly describes the current situation: Most proponents of streetscape monitoring systems are initially motivated by the dream of panoptic disciplinary power, and they aspire to develop surveillance systems to prevent crime and social disorder. Yet in city after city, the initial dream of enacting a preventative system of discipline and social control quickly gives way to shifting rationalizations for CCTV surveillance as a policing mechanism to detect criminal activity after the fact and to make people feel safer on city streets. (Hier, 2010: xvii)

The paradox of surveillance technologies, therefore, may be expressed as the discrepancy between the promise of prevention via a supposed fail-safe system and the consolation of witness when the system invariably fails. Taking this premise as a starting point, this essay argues that this gap between the promise and the reality of surveillance technologies is the consequence of two different understandings of, and contexts for, surveillance: on the one hand, the panoptic of disciplinary societies, and on the other hand, the protocols of the societies of control. It then explores, by way of discussing conventional, digital, and participatory documentary practices, the pleasures and politics of network culture that facilitates systems of mapping, tracking, and surveilling that suggest new ways of control and their subversion.

An Architecture of Control Michel Foucault saw the surveillance afforded by Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as  the “architectural figure of discipline,” arguing “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the [prison] inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (1995: 201).1 This emphasis on visibility in the panoptic, which has become a conventional conception of surveillance as a means of instilling discipline, is questioned and displaced in the contemporary context of surveillance within the digital networks of the World Wide Web. The concerns over surveillance raised by a film such as Erasing David, for instance, are intrinsically related to the efficiency of digital technologies and networks that facilitate and proliferate surveillance. Worries over digital footprints, and their exploitation for a variety of vested interests, as expressed in Erasing David, are distinct from discussions of voyeurism and stalking in earlier discourses that pertain to the scopic

568

Sharon Lin Tay

regime in visual cultures. Within the digital network culture “discipline” has been replaced by control. Gilles Deleuze, noting that “societies of control” had been recognized by Foucault “as our immediate future” (Deleuze, 1992: 4), argues that in these what is important is no longer either a signature [as an individual] or a number [e.g., social security number, as a member of a mass], but a code: the code is a password. … The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.” (1992: 5)

The central hub of observation of the Panopticon has become replaced by distributed networks. Alexander Galloway, drawing on Deleuze, calls this distributed network of control that facilitates surveillance, or its operating procedure, protocol, as the form of management through which “technological control exists after decentralization” (2004: 50). He distinguishes network culture’s heterogeneous, decentralized, and non-hierarchical processes from the panopticon’s all-seeing, top-down, big brothertype hierarchical framework, explaining that “these conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system are what computer scientists call protocol. Thus, protocol is a technique for achieving voluntary regulation within a contingent environment” (2004: 7). If we understand the world as a vast immanent database that is constituted as a complex and interconnected series of networks, the question of surveillance (and its inescapable nature) necessarily comes to the fore, insofar as it is digital networks enabling new surveillance practices that are now of primary concern. Questions of looking, tracking, and spying are now secondary to, and should be seen within the context of, network culture and its enabling of new surveillance forms within a technology of control. Database, whether as concept, metaphor, or aesthetics, also increasingly pervades how we think about media cultures and practices. For theorists such as Sean Cubitt and Laura Marks, the database is characterized by the spectacle of the surface, the end of meaning, a totalitarian aesthetics, and not unlike the Baroque art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his book The Cinema Effect, Cubitt compares the classical baroque to the CGI-dominated Hollywood cinema of the 1990s, in the process establishing the indeterminate space of the database. As the seventeenth century was the epoch of the map, the archive, and double-entry bookkeeping, the spatial media par excellence of the new Atlantic imperium, so is the neobaroque of databases, spreadsheets, and geographical information systems. Information technologies are not qualitatively different from the instruments of imperial bureaucracy. Steadicam navigation of indeterminate space is the spatial art of globalization as the carved fountain was of imperialism. (2004: 235)

Cubitt refers to a cinema that provides no way of entry into the Real. Laura Marks makes a similar argument in her book Enfoldment and Infinity (2010), elaborated upon below. Both Cubitt and Marks’s arguments are premised on Deleuze’s concept



Architectures of Control and Points of Resistance

569

of planes of immanence, invested in finding variations or organizing complexities within the database. Like the phantom characters that inhabit the château in Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), contemporary films that adopt a database aesthetic may be full of characters who are in action and endlessly moving, but they proceed nowhere outside of that architecture or structural network that is designed to both facilitate and contain their existences. Marks discusses the casino heist films, such as Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995) and Ocean’s Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001), as examples that spatially confine its characters; and one may add The Matrix (Andy and Lana Wachowski, 1999) and Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010), among others, to this list. Likewise, contemporary anxieties about surveillance such as those highlighted in Erasing David are precisely over the ways in which we are increasingly part of, and are trackable within, these inescapable networks that exacerbate the perils of becoming subject to surveillance. To understand the extent to which network culture broadens the scope of surveillance, it is useful to consider an example of surveillance as a mechanism of discipline as conceived by Foucault. Mansfield 1962 (2006) is a silent found-footage film made by the Los Angeles artist William E. Jones. Repurposed from a police instructional film made in Mansfield, Ohio, on the ways in which to conduct a sting operation on homosexual men consorting in public lavatories, Jones’s re-edited nine-minute version shows how a camera crew obtains evidence against the men by filming their surreptitious dalliances from behind a two-way mirror. This example of surveillance uses a clandestine regime of looking and recording to produce compliance with the law against sodomy and homosexual acts. Through the direct threat of punishment, disciplinary control over bodies and the exercise of sexualities is enabled. Surveillance in the age of network culture, however, is neither clandestine nor disciplining. Instead, network culture’s regime of control is made apparent in the following discussion of works by Gebhard Sengmüller’s Farm Animal Drawing Generator (2008), Alain Resnais’s Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), and the Texas State’s unsuccessful Texas Virtual Border Watch project that was unveiled in 2008 and then quietly dismissed several years later. Gebhard Sengmüller is an Austrian digital artist whose works include an interest in the construction of auto-generative networks. His Farm Animal Drawing Generator uses a Global Positioning System (GPS) to track the movements of six cows and two donkeys that live on an Austrian farm and renders the geographical data of the animals’ roaming patterns into an abstract art form. The animals were each tagged with a GPS device and their movements were tracked over the course of five days (see Figure 26.1). By removing the map layer from the GPS data he receives at the end of each day, Sengmüller decontextualizes the drawings to produce a series of abstract, layered, color-coded images and videos. The surveillance enabled by the GPS tags attached to the animals does not function to discipline the animals’ movements and limit their behaviors in the coercive sense that the police surveillance featured in Mansfield 1962 does. Rather, GPS technology (see Figure  26.2) enables the assiduous tracking of these animals’ movements and the continuous location of  their positioning within a network that is automatically generated by

570

Sharon Lin Tay

Figure 26.1  Farm Animal Drawing Generator, © 2008 Wolfgang Seierl and Gebhard Sengmüller. Color image available at http://www.gebseng.com/09_farm_animal_drawing_ generator/pics/screensize/farm_animal_drawing_day2.jpg, accessed August 12, 2014.

Figure 26.2  Cow wearing a GPS logger, Farm Animal Drawing Generator, © 2008 Wolfgang Seierl and Gebhard Sengmüller.

their movements across space. This ability to inexorably track and locate is a defining feature of the controlling regime of network culture. While marking the increased threat that is inherent in a technology that facilitates such ubiquitous surveillance compared to the cumbersome and hands-on surveillance in Mansfield 1962, the



Architectures of Control and Points of Resistance

571

abstract images that Sengmüller collected from this project are also aesthetically pleasing. These works invite contemplation about the variations in the animals’ respective movements that is documented within the confines of the paddock in which they roam. For instance, while watching the embedded video on the project’s website, one wonders about the reasons behind a particular animal’s long-range roaming and another’s relative confinement to a particular area. When one considers the trajectories that these animals’ mobilities generate, narratives are invented. I return to the form of the aesthetic in network culture later in this essay. In explorations of digital art forms, the concept of cartography often avails itself as a metaphor to characterize the ways in which digital objects function. Adopting cartography as a conceit assumes a particular notion of immanence for the processes and constraints of a technological object. In his discussion of Resnais’s filmmaking practice, Deleuze conceives of a cinema whose primary motivation is not the representation of reality, but the attempt to approach the ways in which the mind functions (1989: 121). According to Deleuze, Resnais begins with a collective memory, in the form of the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Toute la mémoire du monde. The long tracking shots in the documentary construct “continuums, circuits of variable speed, following the shelving” of books in the library (1989: 119). In other words, the architecture of the library’s physical building as well as bibliographic services as represented in Toute la mémoire du monde is something like an automatically generative network, similar to that of Farm Animal Drawing Generator, and possesses its own protocol: “In the Bibliothèque Nationale the books, trolleys, shelving, stairs, lifts and corridors constitute the elements and levels of a gigantic memory where men themselves are only mental functions, or ‘neuronic messengers’” (1989: 121). Following the logic of this protocol, it is not so much the uniqueness of a particular book, person, or shelf in the film that is of significance; rather, each constituent part functions as a node and its relationship to other constituent parts is that which reveals the topography of the library that facilitates the classification, tracking, and mobility of books. The most interesting part of this system, the voice-over in the film tells us, is the point where the content of a book is actualized by a reader. The library’s entire set up, as it were, colludes to lead up to this point of information retrieval. This process corresponds to Kessler and Schäfer’s description of how archives work: “the material has to be described, indexed and categorized in various ways in order to be storable, identifiable, retrievable and thus viewable or, in a literal sense, to become visible (2009: 287, italics in original). Here the imbrication of information management systems and surveillance in the protocols of digital network culture are prefigured in Resnais’s film. The ways in which network culture facilitates surveillance are demonstrated by The Texas Virtual Border Watch. Inaugurated by the Texas State government in 2008, the project involved the installation of cameras along the Texas-Mexico border that were linked up to the World Wide Web. Anyone anywhere in the world with adequate Internet connectivity is invited to watch this live surveillance footage and report sightings of suspected illegal crossings, on the basis of which the authorities would then decide whether to act. Now, soldiers, guards, or some centralized

572

Sharon Lin Tay

authority are no longer primarily responsible for watching the live feeds of surveillance filming; instead, surveillance is participatory and widened to include anyone plugged into the heterogeneous networks of the global Web. The State government’s implicit goal for The Texas Virtual Border Watch is disciplinary: watched as they cross the Texan border, illegal immigrants risk punishment in the form of arrest, imprisonment, and deportation. It is the same enforcement agenda that the Mansfield police demonstrated in their original film Camera Surveillance, and that William E. Jones critiques through repurposing it in Mansfield 1962 as discussed earlier. Yet by reconfiguring the disciplinary architecture of the panopticon, in using network culture to provide the watchers for the video streaming online, the Texan authorities also undermined it. Border control, being a rather traditional pursuit that is interested in protecting the perimeters of the nation state, works on the basis of distinguishing between “them” and “us.” The list of binary oppositions involved in border control run the gamut between the documented and the undocumented; desirables and undesirables; rich and poor; the healthy and the diseased. The Texas Virtual Border Watch project, however, does not take into consideration the transnational geopolitical paradigms and conditions that created the Mexico/US Texan border in the first place and provided the reasons for, and necessities of, undertaking crossings, in ­contrast to the US-Canadian border, where no similar interest in mounting such a surveillance project has arisen. The ways in which deregulation, free trade agreements, and transnational capital construct and affect the border are explored by Ursula Biemann in her video-essay, Performing the Border (1999) which demonstrates how human trafficking networks that traverse borders are but a microcosm of the transnational hyper-capitalist network that necessitates such mobilities. Performing the Border also shows the way in which the border is an imaginary, constructed space, one that is actualized precisely by acts of crossing. In other words, the border is performative. The Texas Virtual Border Watch enacts this performance that Biemann delineates in her video essay; however, it is a performance of the border imagined on clear racial and xenophobic lines, and thus it embeds a disabling contradiction. Namely, the project assumes a global community of “virtual Texas deputies” as agents for its disciplining surveillance who will view the surveillance footage of its national border and identify those crossing as the unwanted aliens of the imagined Texas border, but who may well be the very same actual or potential illegal immigrants that the Texas authorities are trying to keep out. The Texas authorities’ attempt to pursue an exclusionary political aim that restricts movement through the use of network culture that is predicated on connectivities, mobilities, and flows was not only paradoxical but also unsuccessful. The Texas Virtual Border Watch has failed to achieve its stated purpose; and its failure is instructive of the need to distinguish the difference between discipline and control societies. At the time of writing (2012), the project has been moved from the border authorities to the Department of Public Safety. Brandi Grissom of the El Paso Times reported abysmal achievement rates: while the authorities expected tens of



Architectures of Control and Points of Resistance

573

thousands of arrests and reports, the project was responsible for a mere six arrests and one drug seizure in the latter half of 2008 (Grissom, 2009). The Texas Virtual Border Watch’s failure arises from a surveillance strategy predicated on both the procedures of control, with the protocols of the network’s distributed nodes, and the procedures of disciplining, with the panoptical distinction between the watchers and the watched that, as Hille Koskela notes, “previously formed the basis of surveillance theory,” but which has disappeared (2009: 531). There are further important consequences to this change, as Koskela observes: This ostensibly trivial change is, if closely looked at, quite fundamental. The historical structure of the political positions of “the authorities” and “the public” is fading. When there is no difference between the controllers and the controlled, all politics and ethics need to be rethought. The democratic idea of representational authority is breaking. (2009: 531)

Points of Resistance and Aesthetics of Network Culture The Texas Virtual Border Watch’s inept performance of border control and abject use of surveillance technology naturally leads to critique. Given that appropriation and repurposing are key aesthetic approaches in network culture, and because the security theater that The Texas Virtual Border Watch enacts involves the participation of network culture, it is vulnerable to such appropriation. For example, Joana Moll and Heliodoro Santos (2010) have repurposed The Texas Virtual Border Watch into a multi-platform installation, simply renamed The Texas Border, that raided the original site’s archives for its content, and transformed the former’s surveillance agenda to one of performance and spectacle. By condensing the archives and only selecting footage that shows something happening (mostly signs of illegal border crossings), Moll and Santos transform the paranoid and xenophobic surveillance that the original project encourages into a mode of watching that resembles a videogame experience of spotting the targets. Somewhat surreal, while producing a sense of disbelief and excitement that one is looking at something real, dangerous, and possibly illegal, might describe the experience of engaging with The Texas Border. Presenting footage where something interesting is sighted alters the viewing experience, replaying it as pleasurable spectacle, in contrast to the experience of surveilling the border online for the Texas State government that is largely one of unmitigated boredom because very little happens. In his essay “The Meaning of Network Culture,” Kazys Varnelis provides interesting concepts with which to appreciate art that emerges out of network culture, contextualized in an epoch that has done away with postmodernist assumptions and concerns. He describes appropriation in network culture as having two forms, namely, aggregation and remix. He distinguishes these forms from those of earlier postmodern art, where strategies of appropriation and reuse were ironic and drew upon avant-garde models of subversion. He observes that “in their method

574

Sharon Lin Tay

originality was still critical, both as an institution to critique and as a crutch – For Duchamp, after all, the urinal is nothing until it is signed” (2010: para 58). Varnelis draws on the suggestion by Nicolas Bourriaud that, as he summarizes, “this lack of regard for originality is precisely what makes art based on remix (his word for it is postproduction) appropriate to network culture.” Artists working within network culture “no longer question originality but rather instinctively understand art works as objects constituted within networks, their meaning given by their position in relation to others and their use” (2010: para 59). It is this that characterizes works such as Moll and Santos’s repurposing of The Texas Virtual Border Watch, which distinguish themselves from the originals (if there are still originals in digital culture) by taking apart their modular components and remixing these parts into new objects and in new contexts. No longer concerned with the notion of originality, Varnelis argues that in the aesthetics of network culture it is reorganizing, instead of creating, that becomes the primary preoccupation of artists. This displacement of authorship is also emphasized by Marks who makes a bold and very suggestive argument for an Islamic genealogy of new media art. She observes that Islamic artists do not traditionally consider themselves creators, because the world is finite, created by God out of nothing, and to which nothing can be added. Art, in such a world, consists not in creating something out of nothing, but in showing the relationships among existing things in elegant and delightful ways. Originality consists not in invention but in skillful new variations on a theme. (Marks, 2010: 169)

Much indebted to Deleuzean philosophy, Marks’s approach to Islamic art is premised on Foucault’s method of archaeology in being “concerned with defining the discursive formations of given periods that make it possible for art to respond to the religious and philosophical beliefs of the time.” But, she continues, “what I attempt to do in contemporary art history is a genealogy” (2010: 25). Here she draws on the genealogical method Foucault developed from Nietzsche, in opposition to history as the search for points of origin and truth. It offers an alternative to the traditional historiographic “attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities; because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accidents and succession” (Foucault, 1999: 371). In other words, such a history, for Foucault, maps out master narratives from a past origin to a present time by solidifying series of coincidences and events into normative stories that are then written in stone. History speaks back to itself. Foucault argues that “The traditional devices for constructing a comprehensive view of history and for retracing the past as a patient and continuous development must be systematically dismantled” (1999: 480). Instead, through a genealogical approach, the historical process is viewed as neither simply continuous nor discontinuous, but as “a multiplicity of time spans that entangle and envelop one another” (1999: 430). This allows Foucault, as his editor James D. Faubion notes, “to conceive of history as a plurality of encounters and temporalities”



Architectures of Control and Points of Resistance

575

(1999: xxxv). Faubion argues that, “What it confronts are ‘forces’ and ‘the hazardous play of dominations’ (376) … What it finds are neither mechanisms nor final destinations. It instead finds chance, ‘the luck of the battle [hasard de la lutte] (381)” (1999: xxxiv). In her genealogical approach, Marks argues “that contemporary algorithmic thought and art spring (in part) from an ignored and once-despised ‘source’: the Islamic world and its merely decorative-seeming art” (2010: 25). She adds, “History is so deeply enfolded, so thickly interconnected, that it makes more sense to assume historical connections between things than deny them. Apparent discontinuity, such as the division between the Islamic world and Europe, is actually enfolded history” (2010: 26). It is through enfolding that network culture emerges as an algorithmic art that eschews originality. Marks notes that “imitating nature is not the source of beauty in Islamic art [of the eleventh and twelfth centuries]; it usually is not in ­computer-based art either. Rather beauty arises from the pleasure of artifice” (2010: 168). Like the variations and patterns that she discerns in the formal properties of certain Islamic art, creative practices in digital culture are more concerned not to invent but with finding variations or organizing complexities within a closed, albeit heterogeneous, structure that constitutes the network. The aesthetic pleasure of Sengmüller’s Farm Animal Drawing Generator, discussed earlier, can now be ­understood as arising, in Marks’s words, from the way it shows “the relationship among existing things in elegant and delightful ways” and through its “skillful new variations on a theme” (2010: 169). This understanding of the world from the perspective of network culture, as a state of immanence in the Deleuzean sense, makes contemporary renditions of surveillance potent and of interest. This, perhaps, is unsurprising given the immanence of networks and the architecture of control in network culture. As database art does not have as its primary concern the representation of reality, an argument demonstrated above in discussions of Sengmüller and Resnais’s works, such works increasingly illustrate, represent, or take on the form and characteristics of networks. Myriad mainstream films remediate videogames in their narratives; for instance, films such as Run Lola Run (Tom Twyker, 1997), Ocean’s Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001), and Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) are all dependent for their plot lines on the premise of a spatialized temporality and a labyrinthine environment that has to be maneuvered over the course of the film by the actors, and by spectators. Acts of reorganizing, mapping, tracking, discovering variations, and teasing out complexities come to characterize creative practices in network culture. Writing in Wired magazine, Andrew Keen repeats the truism that the social is now the default setting of our digital lives, especially when pervasive geo-location platforms and services make us all visible and readable like texts (2011: 87). We are trapped, monitored, and our behaviors predicted in this surveillance culture; perhaps we are not dissimilar to the GPS-tagged cows and donkeys in Farm Animals Drawing Generator. As in the argument put forth in Erasing David, once this database registers our existence, it is impossible to opt out. Besides, erasure, even if possible, might not be desirable

576

Sharon Lin Tay

because it wipes out one’s subjectivity, connections, and identity (which again reinforces the importance of belonging in networks). While such an understanding of network culture is unnecessarily fatalistic, it is also the case that both compliance with, or resistance against, network culture require negotiations with protocols. In his criticism of the science fiction film about a dystopian network culture, Gamer (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, 2009), Steven Shaviro makes some valuable remarks about network cultures and control societies, arguing that attempts to critique or subvert network culture must necessarily proceed through those networks that one resists. He writes: There is no going back on the network and its circuits of celebrity and control, and reverting to a supposedly clearer and more honest state of affairs. The only way out is the way through. The only possible oppositional strategy is one of embracing these control technologies, generalizing them, and opening them up. (Shaviro, 2009).

Further, he notes that In the 21st century, cognitive estrangement doesn’t work any more as a subversive strategy (if it ever did); what’s needed is rather a strategy that ups the ante on our very complicity in the technologies and social arrangements that oppress us. (Shaviro, 2009)

The digital projects of Owen Mundy are examples of the strategy Shaviro argues for: one of resistance to, and subversion of, network culture as necessarily through the network, as opposed to strategies of marginalization or rejection. Give Me My Data is an application that allows users to retrieve information that they have given away to Facebook. Give Me My Data finds its inspiration from the Freiheit für meine Akte / Freedom for Our Files protest movement mounted by citizens of the former East Germany for access to personal information collected from decades of state surveillance by the secret police. Thinking about Facebook’s control over users’ personal information alongside the Stasi’s control over entire populations via surveillance makes for interesting comparison: both depend on generative networks (whether of friends or spies) to maintain clandestine control over, and make sense of, data for specific purposes and vested interests. The difference between the Freiheit für meine Akte movement and Give Me My Data is the fact that while the former demanded back information that was never given with consent, the latter is more interested in the organization of voluntarily offered data toward particular interpretations for corporate interests. From the information that the application retrieves, one is able to see the shape and subtleties of one’s networks and the protocols through which Facebook tracks its users. Moreover, these networks may further be aestheticized into database art forms that possess the visual appeal of maps that both confer information and organize knowledge in spatialized form (see, for example, Figure 26.3). That Give Me My Data unearths evidence of online surveillance and makes visible its processes provides a measure of resistance against the pervasiveness of social networking platforms, even though the subversive application itself functions within the structure and discourse of the network it critiques.



Architectures of Control and Points of Resistance

577

Figure 26.3  Mutual friends network graph, November 27, 2010, Give Me My Data (Owen Mundy, http://www.givememydata.com/, accessed August 12, 2014).

Surveillance’s drive toward the evidentiary and to make visible what is otherwise obscured is much dependent on the connectivities that network culture provides. Owen Mundy’s Camp La Jolla project (http://www.camplajolla.org) establishes the connections a tertiary institution has with the military industry by mapping out these relationships and may be described as an expository digital documentary that comes with an attached archive. In network culture, the archive returns in an interesting and proliferating form. As a database or the spatial dimension on which networks are mobilized, the archive is actualized at the various points where the database and the algorithm interface. In Resnais’s Toute la mémoire du monde, these points of actualization occurred when the books meet their readers, where meaning is produced. In the digital interactive documentary, these points of actualization depend on the user’s participation and navigation. Military considerations during the Cold War in the demand for interconnectivity led to systems that then gave rise

578

Sharon Lin Tay

to the World Wide Web and inversely, maneuvering our digital era of sociality, networks, and databases requires that we think politically in military and institutional terms. Camp La Jolla is a large online archive that maps the history of the physical site on which the University of California San Diego sits; it tracks the history of the location back to its use as a military base, and explains the historical exigencies through which many of the university’s disciplines and affiliations feed back into the defense industry. Its collection of stories, facts, interviews, and events coalesce around geographical coordinates that layer together the past and the present in a way that organizes and makes visible the relationships between an educational ­institution and the military complex.

Conclusion The key goal of surveillance is the acquisition of information, with the aim of influence and control toward particular ends. Yet, this aim of gaining control and ensuring voluntary regulation is often conflated with issues of punishment, law enforcement, and discipline where duress for the viewed is always implied. This chapter’s exploration of network culture has demonstrated the ways in which networks and their protocols thereby constitute forms of control, but which are nevertheless distinguished from concerns of enforcement, discipline, and duress. It is analysis of these networks and forms of control that must be the basis for understanding contemporary surveillance culture. As this chapter shows, creative practices that work within the premises of network culture offer up alternative modes of aesthetics and pleasure in their explorations of the ways in which surveillance is used.

Note 1 Bentham himself (1843: Section V) writes, “Single cells throughout, that is, a number of cells equal to that of the prisoners for whose reception they are designed – cells in which, under the Panopticon discipline, they are to work, and eat, and attend Divine service.”

References Bentham, Jeremy (1843) The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4. Edinburgh: William Tait. Cubitt, Sean (2004) The Cinema Effect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: The Athlone Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1992) Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, 59, 3–7. Foucault, Michel (1995) Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel (1999) Aesthetics, Methods, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, trans. James D. Faubion, ed. Robert Hurley. New York: New Press.



Architectures of Control and Points of Resistance

579

Fuentes, Annette (2011) Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse. London and New York: Verso. Galloway, Alexander R. (2004) Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grissom, Brandi (2009) Virtual Border Surveillance Ineffective, Cost Millions. El Paso Times, January 26, http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_11552806, accessed August 8, 2014. Hier, Sean P. (2010) Panoptic Dreams: Streetscape Video Surveillance in Canada. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press. Keen, Andrew (2011) Sharing Is a Trap. Wired, UK edition (March), 86–89. Kessler, Frank and Schäfer, Mirko Tobias (2009) Navigating YouTube: Constituting a Hybrid Information Management System. In Snickars, Pelle and Vonderau, Patrick (eds.) The YouTube Reader, pp. 275–291. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden. Koskela, Hille (2009) “Watch the Border 24/7, on Your Couch” – Texas Virtual Border Watch Program and the Politics of Informing. Conference Proceedings, Surveillance in Latin America, Brasil, March 4–6, pp. 526–537: http://www2.pucpr.br/ssscla/papers/SessaoI_ A19_pp526–537.pdf, accessed August 8, 2014. Marks, Laura (2010) Enfoldment and Infinity: Islamic Genealogy in New Media Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Moll, Joana and Santos, Heliodoro (2010) The Texas Border, http://www.janavirgin.com/ texas.html, accessed August 9, 2014. Shaviro, Steven (2009) Gamer. In The Pinocchio Theory, http://www.shaviro.com/ Blog/?p=830, accessed August 8, 2014. Varnelis, Kazys (2010) The Meaning of Network Culture. Eurozine, January, http://www. eurozine.com/articles/2010-01-14-varnelis-en.html, accessed August 8, 2014.

27

The World Viewed

Documentary Observing and the Culture of Surveillance Elizabeth Cowie

Stanley Cavell, in The World Viewed, suggests that the magic of cinema arises, “Not by literally presenting us with the world, but by permitting us to view it unseen” (1979: 40). He argues that, “In viewing films, the sense of invisibility is an expression of modern privacy or anonymity. It is as though the world’s projection explains our forms of unknownness and of our inability to know” (40–41). We are displaced from our now-time of ongoing reality, overlooking from a distance another world but, Cavell argues, the film screen overcomes our fixed separation, so that our displacement is experienced “as our natural condition.” He asks, “What do we wish to view in this way? What specific forms discover this fundamental condition of the medium of film?” (40). Cavell here is discussing movies, fictional films, but our relation to documentary film, too, is that of “watchers,” voyeurs in the ordinary sense of this word. In fiction a world is constructed for us to observe, and our understanding is enabled by that construction, however difficult. Cavell refers to this as an activity of attention: “The discontinuities [within the film] are those of attention. You are given bits of the world, and you must put them together into those [characters’] lives, one way or another, as you have yours” (156, italics in the original). In documentary film the world is observed for us to view, but this too is only in “bits” whose selection and combination are no less constructed. Robert Bresson identifies an issue arising here when he notes: Problem. To make what you see be seen, through the intermediary of a machine that does not see it as you see it. … And to make what you understand be understood, through the intermediary of a machine that does not understand it as you do. (Bresson, 1950: 79) A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



The World Viewed

581

Watching is presented by Cavell as being a positive potential of film, of documentary, what then are its dangers? It is video surveillance and CCTV that have given rise to the greatest public concern to date, while these most closely parallel the documentary’s observational gaze and desire to show life as it happens, indeed similar fixed cameras are now used to record ongoing life as public information, or “infotainment,” such as the British series, Educating Essex.1 Harun Farocki has argued, however, that “With the increase in electronic control structures, everyday life will become just as hard to portray and dramatize as everyday work already is” (2002: 107). The documentaries discussed here address these concerns, while at the same time a number develop what Roland Schöny has called a specific “aesthetic of surveillance” (2008: 3), which he identifies in contemporary art video that engages the processes of surveillance through using CCTV and other surveillance footage to reflect upon and critique it. Can such works challenge the gaze of surveillance, as Andrea Mubi Brighenti suggests, through “the uncanny fact that in some way, through the technological setup, the object stares back … It is a feeling of Unheimlichkeit, which questions the changing boundaries of the human itself within complex socio-technical assemblages” (2010: 185). Explored here is the way that the “understanding” Bresson refers to, but which the camera as such cannot produce, is enabled in these documentary works. Watching involves all the senses, as the introduction to this section noted, but it is the role of vision in watching that has dominated surveillance studies (Lyon, 2006; 2007: 56–62), and a key reference here has been Foucault’s use of the Panopticon of Bentham’s prison architecture as the exemplar for the control of an all-seeing gaze. Foucault characterized this as a “type of power that can properly be called panopticism,” such that “We live in a society where panopticism reigns” (2001a: 58), and which, in Discipline and Punish, he argues characterizes modernity’s “disciplinary society” (1977: 216). Foucault later noted, however, that the Panopticon “is modern in one sense, but we can also say that it is completely archaic,” insofar as the idea it draws on is “the oldest dream in the world” of “an eye, a gaze, a principle of surveillance” (2007: 66). Foucault is concerned to analyze not this dream, but the practices of surveillance that characterize modernity, and for which the gaze is only one technique. For it is not the looking, but the observing that is central to the watching of surveillance for both Bentham and Foucault. The new principle in Bentham’s proposals for prison reform2 was the Panopticon, an architectural feature that would afford a continuous gaze and thereby enable the constant observation or “inspection” of the prisoners, although he was never able to realize this effectively in his architectural designs.3 Such observation would ensure that the prisoner – and by extension, the asylum inmate, hospital carer, or school student – was undertaking the required activity effectively, thus being “disciplined.”4 Moreover, Bentham required that the distribution of inmates to be observed would be according to strict classification by age, class, gender, and crime, to prevent improper mixing, such as, for example, sexual activity.5 As a result, Foucault writes, “the prison with all the corrective technology at its disposal is to be resituated at the

582

Elizabeth Cowie

point where the codified power to punish turns into a disciplinary power to observe” (1977: 224). Foucault demonstrates the way in which disciplining, the way we are trained or educated, or brought to follow a certain code of conduct, arises through being observed. The Panopticon’s importance for Foucault is therefore not the watching as such but rather the architectural arrangement it proposed that configures the prison as a place where criminality is made visible, just as the hospital is a place of visibility for illness, and the asylum is a place of visibility of madness.6 Véronique Voruz notes that places of visibility are “the condition of possibility of statements that can only be uttered from such places, and from subject-positions within” (2012: 133). We don’t see “madness,” it is made visible in language, which structures perception of the mad, and how those identified as mad understand themselves to be thought of as mad. Moreover, as Deleuze notes, quoted too by Voruz, “The subject who sees is himself a place within visibility, a function derived from visibility” (Deleuze, 1988: 57: Voruz, 2012: 233). The gaze is the “absolute eye of knowledge” through a “suzerainty of the visible” (Foucault, 1975: 204) in which the statement, language, has primacy (Deleuze, 1988: 67). It is the observing gaze and its knowledges that is power in the disciplinary society, an epistemophilia that seeks to know the bodies and minds of us all involving an inherent sadism “relayed by the scopic drive” (Voruz, 2012: 138). It is a play of forces producing what Foucault called the “deathly malice of knowledge” (2011: 198). CCTV has come to be seen as realizing Bentham’s dream of the Panopticon, apparently resolving the architectural problems of optical viewpoint, yet it does not enable the panopticism that concerned Foucault, namely, as a form of power. This arises, Foucault argued, with the supervision that surveillance enables, and through “examination” by someone, a teacher, factory foreman, physician, psychiatrist, “and who, so long as he exercised power, had the possibility of both supervising and constituting a knowledge concerning those he supervised … [t]his new knowledge … was organised around the norm, in terms of what was normal or not, correct or not, in terms of what one must do, or not do.” Examination “was the basis of the power, the form of knowledge-power, that was to give rise not, as in the case of the inquiry, to the great sciences of observation, but to what we call the ‘human sciences’ – of psychiatry, psychology and sociology” (2001a: 59).7 Specific disciplines, “panopticisms” (1977: 223) or “panoptic techniques” (224), Foucault writes, “characterise, classify, specialise; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchise individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate” (223). The surveillance camera, as also the algorithm of network surveillance, doesn’t observe, it records; it becomes disciplinary when the being-looked-at is organized in relation to sets of values, of required behavior, and of norms. This requires a human agent as watcher, or a computer programmed with the “values” of a disciplinary discourse. As Voruz notes, the “gaze is not about what one sees but rather how one looks” (2012: 135, italics in original). Moreover, Foucault comments in an interview in 1977, “It would be wrong to say that the principle of visibility governs all technologies of power used since the eighteenth century.” For “the procedures of power that



The World Viewed

583

are at work in modern societies are much more numerous, diverse and rich” (1996: 227). One such procedure of power he calls “biopolitics,” the regulation of populations through data. The observing gaze now addresses, not the prisoner, worker, or hospital patient, but the indexes of human activity, for example, transforming the record of a family event – a birth, a death – into a statistic. Being registered as data does not itself control, this only arises through the analysis of such data to enable rationally organized control in which individuals are known insofar as they are part of multiplicities. These forms of observation are now being replaced by digital searchable databases, and our identity as a citizen and individual is located not only on barcoded driving licenses, social security numbers, and so on but also through biometric identification devices. Deleuze refers to this as a society of control, where the individual addressed through these technologies of power is a “dividual,” divided into segmented traits that can be subjected to procedures of control, such as testing, or differentially enabled access to information via passwords (Deleuze, 1992: 5). Control was of course always part of the disciplinary through, as Foucault emphasized, its role in power-knowledge, which remains central to the digital and cyberspace, in the extraction of knowledge from us as we surf the Web. The idea of control through being watched, anywhere and anytime, nevertheless is central to the widespread opposition to CCTV, as well as forms of data-gathering. This is explored by David Bond in his film Erasing David, which documents through direct filming and re-enactment, his personal experiment to test the extent and effectiveness of contemporary surveillance by attempting to disappear for 30 days, and evade the efforts of the private detectives he has hired to find him. The film’s advertising tag, “He has nothing to hide but does he have nothing to fear?” suggests, however, a different story – of anxiety and paranoia (Figure  27.1). Like Morgan

Figure 27.1  Seen on cctv monitor as he embarks on disappearing, Bond asks: “What could other people do with my data?” Erasing David (David Bond and Melinda McDougall, 2010).

584

Elizabeth Cowie

Figure 27.2  David Bond’s hunted look as he tries to evade the detectives. Erasing David (David Bond and Melinda McDougall, 2010, produced by Green Lions).

Spurlock’s Super Size Me (2004), Erasing David is performative, for Bond develops the personal direct-filming approach of Michael Moore and Nick Broomfield in becoming the subject of, as well as investigator in the film, in order to demonstrate the power and danger of surveillance. As a result, Bond also performs it as a spectacle of paranoia for us as he becomes the hunted (Figure 27.2), on the watch for anything or anyone that might reveal his whereabouts, something that he acknowledges on his website, “When I look at the film now and see myself looking pale and gaunt it takes me back to how frightening it was at the time – but I reckon I’m more careful now than I’ve ever been with my data” (http://erasingdavid.com/discussion/ paranoid-moi/, accessed August 10, 2014). It is through space, and Bond’s placing within spaces, that Lorna Muir (2012) suggests the film figures his increasing paranoia, as when we see Bond watching a bank of CCTV screens that record near his home, the camera pulls back from its usual mid-shot to a medium-long shot showing him “lost in a sea of images which continually produce data” (271). While the focus of the film is on dataveillance, what we see are the detectives, for, as Muir observes, “The data trails generated by these practices are not screened, but the devices which mediate them are” (270) and she suggests that this is due to the “largely ‘invisible’ nature” of dataveillance. Muir concludes that films such as Erasing David and the fictional Minority Report that address the “information city” do so by representing the spaces in which “digital monitoring practices occur with continued reference to the material in their mise-en-scène” in order to signify the immaterial and invisible data surveillance. That such strategies in film and video are common, she argues, “also suggests that the control paradigm of Deleuze is potentially challenged or resisted” (277), in placing dataveillance in an embodied and material space. If so, this is quite separate from and perhaps opposed to the



The World Viewed

585

fear, and paranoia, that these films represent and engender through the suspense created by their plot-lines. Instead, the challenge Muir identifies, and which I explore further in relation to Standard Operating Procedure, may be understood in terms of the critique of knowledge and its powers that Foucault developed in his discussion of Nietzsche’s essay on history and genealogy, distinguishing two opposed forms, connaissance and savoir (in English these are both “knowledge”). Connaissance is the gaze of the neutral historian-observer that “recognizes,” while individuality and singularity is suppressed, leading to objective knowledge and thus power. In contrast, the gaze of genealogy, of savoir, “refuses the certainty of absolutes” and becomes a gaze that distinguishes, separates, and disperses; that is capable of liberating divergence and marginal elements – the kind of dissociating view that is capable of decomposing itself, capable of shattering the unity of man’s being through which it was thought that he could extend his sovereignty to the events of the past. (Nietzsche, 1998: 379)

It is a “perspectival knowledge” (382) that makes apparent “its grounding in a particular place and time” for, as Nietzsche argues There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; the more affects we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our “concept” of the thing, our “objectivity.” (Nietzsche, 1994: 92).8 Savoir, for Foucault, is the will to knowledge that undoes the certainty of “a” knowledge, given and complete, once and for all.

Documentary, in re-presenting recorded reality, observes, which may be as c­ onnaissance, in a discursive ordering of “observation,” of classification, and differentiation within a disciplining discourse that is itself a mode of power. But its gaze as an organized statement may allow other ways of looking, other eyes not accredited within a site of visibility such as the prison or clinic, and allow other voicings to be heard, as savoir. For documentary, this suggests, it is not the taking back of the surveilling gaze of connaissance that is necessary, but a different way of looking, and of how to see that organizes the recorded seen and heard, and as a repositioning of the already-seen and heard, namely, the “archive” of audiovisual documents. Jacques Rancière extends and develops Foucault’s critique of “knowledge” in his concept of a “distribution of the sensible” as an ordering of the sensible, of that which is capable of being apprehended by the senses, both material and intellectual, in a distribution that determines the set of possibilities and modalities of what is the visible and the audible as the known, as well as what can be said, thought, made, or done. It apportions places and forms of participation in a common domain or world, thereby establishing the modes of perception within the sensible order (2004: 12) In his concept of the “sensible” Rancière opposes the “distribution” that separates art and politics, the thought and the felt, not to make them the same, but to enable an

586

Elizabeth Cowie

understanding of the possibilities of each. He argues that “The aesthetic is in effect, a division of knowledge, an interference in the order of sensible experience which brings social positions, tastes, attitudes, knowledges and illusions into correspondence” (2006: 6). It is with his concept of “dissensus” that Rancière identifies the chance for change in the distribution of the sensible. Dissensus as such does not produce change, or involve disagreement, rather it names the process of a fissuring of the sensible order made possible not by a “perception” of a new “fact” but by the perception of an incompleteness, “a gap in the sensible itself ” (2010: 38). Such a gap presses upon us, demanding a thinking otherwise and anew that in art can then be political as “the aesthetic anticipation of the future” (2004: 29), in a reconfiguration of the sensible, of the felt and the known through sensible forms and material structures that can figure our encounter in a future becoming. (We might think here, too, of Deleuze’s “irrational interval” that is also the opening of a gap, and a thinking of what is not yet, and not yet thought – and a movement between before and after in the now.) How might documentary savoir be undertaken in relation to surveillance activities? In what ways can the “aesthetic experience” (Rancière, 2006: 4) of documentary disturb the distribution of the sensible? Simon Menner, in his photo-exhibition and ongoing web project, Images from the Secret STASI Archives or: what does Big Brother see, while he is watching you?,9 has photographed images, objects, and equipment that he found in this archive, and from this miscellany a story emerges of everyday surveillance that, re-presented, is also a story of life lived – the photos taken of homes that were to be searched ensured that everything was replaced as it had been, and the occupants would be unaware that the State Security Service (STASI) had been there. But now these photos are a record of household equipment, of objects used, of room décor, and a way of living. These, and the images of training in disguises, and of STASI spies filming Allied spies, that now seem comical, are also chilling as an index of the all-pervasive STASI machine of spying. Menner asks: “Can the terror such a repressive system spreads be found in these images? Or is the ‘gaze of evil’ pretty banal and we have to attach the terror ourselves?” It is in Menner’s re-photographing that we are brought to encounter these images, and the gap, the missing that he points to, namely the problem of how to “see” terror, that is, to think it. Trevor Paglen, an artist geographer, has been exploring the secret activities of the US military and intelligence agencies – the “black world” – over the last eight years through making it visible and knowable in images or digital mapping by the technology of surveillance itself – telescopic and astrophotographic equipment. As a result his photographs (see Paglen, 2010) are not what the eye might see. For example, Helen Chang, writing about Paglen’s work, notes that: In The Fence (Lake Kickapoo, Texas) (2010), what looks like a fiery sunset is actually the electromagnetic image of the radar perimeter that blankets the entire US, its microwave frequencies shifted into the visible spectrum. Paglen calls “the Fence” – serving to track any satellite flying over the US, as well as its early missile warning system – Earth’s largest galactic footprint. (Chang, 2011)



The World Viewed

587

In the series Limit Telephotography, Paglen employs high-end optical systems to photograph top-secret governmental sites; and in The Other Night Sky, he uses the data of amateur satellite watchers to track and photograph classified spacecraft in Earth’s orbit. In other works Paglen transforms documents such as passports, flight data, and aliases of CIA operatives into art objects.10 In his work, what is known as one thing becomes another, disturbing the fixity of the visible as the factual knowable. The desire for a “bird’s eye view,” and to see the world from one’s chair via computer screen, is addressed in Renata Marquez and Wellington Cançado’s film Global Safari (Powered by Google) (2010).11 The world is traversed on safari, but no longer as only white colonial game hunters, via Google Earth’s images that are produced through the commercial satellite, GeoEye, a joint venture with the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, but which are restricted to a lower spatial resolution, producing a form of myopia. Marquez and Cançado (2010: 131) note: No eye is neutral, much less the watchful eye of the satellites with their politically adjustable myopias. We call Myopia Space the geometric range between the height limit of the reach of a satellite in the exact point where the image is presented with resolution and our own vision.

This is variable, so the “Myopia Index measures the cloudiness of the public character of the territory in Google Earth” (131). For its images are not uniform, being collected from a variety of sources with different interests, and thus it is “a powerful atlas of political, economic and technological dynamics in today’s world. Its accuracy resides in the range or the lack of definition of the available images” (129). Lagos is not seen with the same sharpness as New York, and not everywhere is visible; we see Google’s partial, unequal viewing of the world as an incompleteness and as veiling a perspectivalism that orders our experience of the world. Global Safari explores the pleasures of surveillance at home through our encounter with the snapshot, the unrepeatable – contingent – moment caught by our gaze as it searches the already-seen of the satellite camera’s recording (Figure  27.3 and Figure 27.4). It starts at the same location used by Charles and Ray Eames for their earlier film, Powers of Ten, commissioned by IBM (1968 and 1977).12 Powers of Ten, while a key reference for Global Safari, is not however about a panoptic gaze “but a statement about our capacity to imagine the unknown, to represent it with available tools, and about the desire to see the imaginary of lives (a picnic in a park) that explains the reason for the enigmatic things we create and our relationship to them in the world” (Marquez and Cançado, 2010: 128), it was “a visual fable about scientific optimism and the consequences of changes in scale” (133). Powers of Ten presents the analog aerial image of a family picnic in Chicago, zooming out using a scale up to 1024 so that, as the voice-over explains, “every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only as a speck of light among many others” in order to show the relative size of the world. In contrast, Google Earth “is an immersive demo on the spreading of technology and

588

Elizabeth Cowie

Figure 27.3  Tokyo, January 2007, Global Safari (Renata Marquez and Wellington Cançado, 2009). Traversing the globe, zooming in and out using the scale of 1024, from Chicago to Belo Horizonte, Dubai, Mexico City, Istanbul, Beijing, Paris, Moscow, London, and Tokyo, each sequence is accompanied by haunting original music, and a voice-over story in the language of the country.

Figure 27.4  Zoomed into a tennis match, at circa 35o 55ʹ 14.80ʺ N 139o 38ʹ 25.49ʺ E. Global Safari (Renata Marquez and Wellington Cançado, 2009).



The World Viewed

589

the exponential dismantling of the notion of scale” which it does “in the era of ­googols” (133), the term designating 10100 from which Google derives its name. It is another aspect of Foucault’s work that I want to now consider, in which he is concerned with “three modes of objectification that transform human beings into subjects.” One mode objectivizes “the productive subject, the subject who labors.” Another mode divides the subject “inside himself or divided from others … Examples are the mad or sane, the sick or healthy, the criminals and the ‘good boys’ ” (Foucault, 2001b: 327). Frederick Wiseman’s films have focused on the kinds of “places of visibility” of such dividing that Foucault addressed, notably in Titicut Follies (1967), High School (1968), Law and Order (1969), Hospital (1970), Basic Training (1971), Juvenile Court (1973), Welfare (1975), all involving state agencies, but also in his documentaries that explore other kinds of spaces and their visibility, such as Zoo (1993) or Boxing Gym (2010). Moreover, Wiseman’s use of an observing camera in his documentaries in these places of visibility makes palpable for the spectator the objectification Foucault identifies, in a sadistic, surveilling gaze that exposes its subjects as objects for our view. His films, however, also engage us as savoir, through the multiple perspectives of and upon the participants they present, demanding us to think outside of our given categories of madness, or the sex criminal, and the medical, to understand differently what we see and the way we are shown what we see. Foucault’s third mode is “how men have learned to recognize themselves as subjects,” explored in his work on sexuality (2001b: 327–328). Here a different way of seeing is important, namely seeing or imagining oneself being seen, that is another aspect of the gaze as surveillance whereby the disciplining power of the gaze is both an observing that produces statements, knowledge, that “speak” the persons who are objects of the gaze, and an internalizing on the part of those persons. He comments, “Two different things are involved here: the observing gaze, the act of observation on the one hand, and internalization on the other” (1996: 232). It is “an observing gaze that each individual feels weighing on him, and ends up internalizing to the point that he is his own overseer: everyone in this way exercises surveillance over and against himself ” (233).13 In the prison or asylum, this may produce compliant inmates, but it is also the very way we are subjects as such. Our minds and bodies are seen anew through science and medicine, through their “eyes,” and we become observers of ourselves in the terms of these discourses – medicine, madness, pedagogy, sexual relations. Social networking, notably Facebook, are new sites for producing for others such self-surveillance, leading in turn to surveillance, for example by employers, or police, but also by “friends,” as in Catfish (Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman 2001), which I return to later in this essay. And we confide our observations of ourselves to others, and to a camera, for self-surveillance is a desire to know the self and to be known, realized in a powerful and poignant performance by Jonathan Caouette in his autobiographical documentary Tarnation (2003). Bond too, in Erasing David, speaks directly to camera, such as after his escape from city surveillance to the countryside, seen in big close-up but with an unnatural greenish hue from the night-vision camera. Ironically, as Muir  notes, he “seems to feel a sense of security in his film camera as he uses it as

590

Elizabeth Cowie

a comforting presence with which he can share data.” Indeed, “Bond often talks to the camera as he would to a person or to a webcam, offering a deeper level of surveillance as he communicates his innermost thoughts and motivations to the machine” (2012: 272).

Life as CCTV: Surveillance Culture The all-seeing eye is an image and idea in many cultures, as the gaze that judges, or as the one that fends off evil, and it seems realized in CCTV monitoring, as a prosthetic eye that, supposedly, “sees” better, in more places, not only the enclosed sites of the prison, or school, but also out on the streets, recording you and me, and making “places of visibility” ubiquitous. Its role for surveillance is threefold: firstly, used as security cameras that are monitored, it is a “watchman” but, as noted earlier, its multiple eyes require an agent who sees what the camera shows, and can cognize and interpret – correctly or incorrectly – what the “event” is: threatening or playful, consensual or imposed, and thus able to trigger action in the ongoing, now-time of the seen so that the prison warders/school security/police can intervene to break up a fight, or apprehend those undertaking disruptive/criminal activities. Secondly, cameras are used to deter criminal activity through the fear of  detection, in shops and shopping malls, trains, buses, car parks, streets, and schools, making these spaces safer. Watched, citizens may modify their behavior in the now-time of their activities in relation to a possible, that is, imagined, gaze in present (if monitored) or future time (if not monitored). Here CCTV is disciplining through a self-surveillance – how might what I am doing or about to do appear to the other who is or maybe watching? Thirdly, CCTV recordings are treated as evidential documentation, their function now forensic in providing visual evidence of past events within a legal framework. As a result CCTV has been a key focus for concerns about privacy and human rights, while as a form of recording found reality it has been material for documentarists and artists, as this section will explore. Nino Leitner’s Every Step You Take (2007) is a searing examination of such surveillance that informs while engaging us in the very surveilling it critiques. Like Suspect Nation, in which Observer journalist Henry Porter explored the Blair government’s excessive concern to collect personal data (broadcast by Channel 4, UK, 2006, dir. Neil Ferguson), the film draws on interviews with academic experts to examine how Britain became host to more cameras than anywhere in the world. It challenges the claims made for CCTV, not merely that often the police still arrive too late, but rather that the crime simply moves to where there are no cameras. Or, as in Southampton, where the cameras have a black surround, the film discovers that as a result passersby think they are street lights, thus defeating the aim of deterrence (the camera pole does have a sign, but it is too high up to read!). Face recognition remains inaccurate despite advances in the programming, because the camera’s high-angle cannot deliver the required height-level image.



The World Viewed

591

Figure 27.5  An expert explains that thousands of CCTV systems remain analog and their controlling software can be hacked, enabling live broadcasts all over the world to be watched. Seen here are a university graduate study lounge, a church in Poland, and public spaces and offices in the United Kingdom. Every Step You Take (Nino Leitner, 2007, produced by Nino Film).

The film shows that people in Britain do want security cameras, although they don’t necessarily feel safer, in contrast to Austria, whose citizens feel safe enough and view CCTV as unnecessary. Austrians are, however, subject to monitoring through compulsory registration of their address, unlike Britain. Moreover, half of cameras are still analog, the film reveals, and can be hacked, as seen in shots of unprotected CCTV video from across the world (Figure 27.5). The group “Radio Netwatcher” demonstrated that police surveillance in Vienna, too, is hackable, and in a re-enactment in the film the police are shown watching a street for drug dealers – who did not appear – but who nevertheless find another scene of interest, in no way illegal but voyeuristically entertaining, when the camera tilts to an upstairs window and reveals a woman undressing. The voyeuristic pleasures of the gaze, that might be called “surveillertainment,” are introduced in the film’s opening reference to Big Brother (Endemol, 2000, UK and worldwide, continuing) in re-enactments that mimic Big Brother’s camera surveillance, shown on a TV screen placed against a black background, onto which the film’s camera performs a continual zoom. We see a woman sleeping, then having sex with a man – perhaps this is her dream, or it corresponds to what the viewer wishes to see? For next is a scene of disciplining consequent on the surveillance, as “Jade” is called to the Big Brother room and given a second warning for again disobeying instructions – this time that housemates do not return to bed or go to sleep. Then, over zooming and panning “vérité” shots of market stalls, busy streets, and crowds watching a royal procession, narrator Stuart Freeman’s voice-over tells us: “We all like to watch people. Modern society is obsessed with visual stimulation. Our

592

Elizabeth Cowie

voyeuristic gaze is especially aroused on the promise of getting to see real-life action. But what about being watched – constantly?” This not only by the state, but by your neighbors, who can buy bugging devices, or through the scheme involving Shoreditch TV, a local service run in London with government funds, which has a crime channel that allows people access to the CCTV cameras in their area, whereby they can be not just nosy but also spies. Every Step You Take makes vivid the debates in surveillance studies by matching the narrator’s and interviewees’ accounts with images that put the viewer within the scene through movement within the frame, or amplified by close-up or high-angle shots, and by movement of our position of view, as the film itself tracks and zooms, using jump cuts, and fast editing, drawing us to identify as if we were the surveilled. But it also offers respite, in interludes of shots with music whose length – from 13 to 33 seconds – introduces a different tempo and rhythm, as a time of reflective engagement between new verbal and visual information, or with speeded-up filming, ­hurtling through London’s streets. Going out onto the streets of London, the film asks people their view of CCTV cameras: man: It doesn’t bother me. I’d rather have that and safety than take a chance   and not have them. man 2: It’s a necessity for the safety of every individual. girl: You know, if it’s not obvious I don’t mind it quite so much. man 3: They look out for me anywhere any time they are. interviewer:  But do you feel observed all the time? young man: No, I like cameras.

Which returns us to reality TV, and the wish to be seen that draws people to take part in Big Brother, or to agree to participate in observational non-fiction television programs such as One Born Every Minute or Educating Essex, that use similar fixed surveillance cameras to those in Big Brother. This has been called the “participatory panopticon” (Whitaker, 1999: 212).14 Where before in the Panopticon the few watched the many, now, in the constructed or found spaces of visibility of these programs the many watch the few, which has been called the “synopticon” (Mathiesen, 1997), yet what is contrived is spectacle via surveillance. John Corner, in what he has termed “post-documentary,” has identified a set of practices, forms, and functions that center around an “emphasis on microsocial narrative and their forms of play around the self observed and the self-in-performance” (2002: 266) with attendant pleasures in observing the gap between being and seeming. The “selving” that we observe, that is, the observation of a “true” self emerging from the performance, which was the object of direct cinema documentary, is now packaged in the reality game-show format created by Big Brother. Such a show does not simply entertain, however, for the surveilling camera allows us to observe and thus become involved as spectators in considering the possibility of different ways of being the self and being with the other, engaging forms and processes we commonly call “identification.”



The World Viewed

593

Re-seeing Surveillance: CCTV Artveillance Artists have referred to surveillance in their work, through parody and jarring uncanniness, such as in Bansky’s street art, and panoptICONS (2010) by Thomas voor ’t Hekke and Bas van Oerle working together under the name of FRONT404, who write: The surveillance camera seems to have become a real pest that feeds on our privacy. To represent this, camera birds – city birds with cameras instead of heads – were placed throughout the city center of Utrecht where they feed on our presence. In addition, a camera bird in captivity was displayed to show the feeding process and to make the everyday breach of our privacy more personal and tangible. (http://rebelart.net/ thomas-voor-t-hekke-bas-van-oerle-panopticons/006470/, accessed August 10, 2014)

Artists have also used surveillance technologies to make art. The incorporation of real-time filming, or the re-presentation of CCTV recordings used as “found footage” material by filmmakers and visual artists, has been a central way in which surveillance has been addressed. The fixed-site high-angle CCTV camera films from above, producing a specific spatial relation. “The recurring ideograms of spatial situations function as codes, which enable immediate identification of the substance of the overall context with the aesthetic of surveillance” (Schöny, 2008: 3). This is especially apparent in video installations that deploy real-time image feedback. Bruce Nauman in Video Surveillance Piece: Public Room, Private Room (1969– 1970) is addressing not surveillance but the gallery visitor’s experience of herself within the work, using the live-image feedback of CCTV not only to create self-awareness but also through disorientation, a feeling of alienation. The installation is comprised of two identical rooms, one of which is hidden from the visitor. Walking into the “public” room, the visitor sees a ceiling-mounted surveillance camera pointed towards a closed-circuit monitor on the floor that is showing real-time (live) footage of a room that she may assume is the one she is in, but cannot see herself captured on the screen until she observes the monitor within the monitor, and discovers herself seen in another place, the hidden room. The effect is achieved by feeding the video monitoring of a room into its identical twin.15 Such video installations are sculptural, depending on a specific spatial arrangement in which the gallery visitor is engaged. Closed circuit video recordings used as “found footage” became part of video culture, as a performance that may be seen as an installation in the gallery – for example as two screens – or viewable on a cinema screen, or as a DVD. It has been suggested that surveillance is an intrinsic aspect of the video image, in its continuous filming as a “longtake” and live-recording, or “real-time,” now overtaken by digital film (Duguet, 1988: 229–230). Serge Daney has distinguished electronic media – telelvision, advertising, techno-military – as the “visual,” an “optical verification that things are functioning on a purely technical level: there are no reverse shots, nothing is missing, everything is sealed in a closed circuit.” This contrasts with the cinematic as the image that “always occurs on the border between two force fields; its purpose is to testify to a certain alterity, and although the core is always there, something is always missing. The image is

594

Elizabeth Cowie

always both more and less than itself ” (Daney, 1991: 163). Here I want to consider the use of CCTV footage in Harun Farocki’s I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (2001, 25 min.) not only, as Christa Blümlinger (2004: 315) suggests, as restoring the possibility of the image in signifying something missing, and as introducing a certain alterity but also to show that it can be understood as genealogical in Foucault’s terms. I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts is an essay work viewable as two-screen video installation and as a one-screen DVD. It figures Foucault’s disciplinary regime, using CCTV footage from Corcoran prison, California, staging the forms of control imposed through its re-presentations, notations, and juxtapositions. For example, the circular exercise yard is divided into segments, each with a camera; here prisoners spend just 30 minutes a day, and it is where fights regularly break out, often provoked as spectacle when guards select known enemies or members of rival gangs to be in the yard together. In response, a guard calls a warning, and fires a shot with a rubber bullet, but if the fight continues, live ammunition is used. Farocki uses an extract of prison video footage of such an event (first broadcast on CBS News 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace, 1997) in which the fighting men are doubled on Farocki’s split-screen, then in the left screen a title explains: “White gun smoke moves across the image: A guard has opened fire.” William Martinez has been shot, and lies dead for over nine minutes until guards carry his body away (Figure 27.6). While this has been compressed to just over a minute, Malin Wahlberg comments that the doubled sequence

Figure 27.6  A still from a silent American film of a fictional prison scene juxtaposed with a CCTV incident image from Corcoran prison. I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (Harun Farocki, 2001, produced by Generali Foundation and Harun Farocki Filmproduktion).



The World Viewed

595

accomplishes another of those contemplative moments that may be produced in moving images by the abstract duration of moderated speed, and the time-space measurement of editing. Two things are especially poignant in this passage of the film. First, the insufficient record of the surveillance tape, and, second, the principle according to which it has been preserved: the deviance and the fatal outcome of the inscribed event. (Wahlberg, 2004: 24)

We see inmates and their visitors, their surreptitious embraces caught on camera, speaking to emotions and desires that are corralled and forbidden. Inserted between these are shots from American movies of fictional prison scenes (Figure 27.7) that suggest possible imaginings, of escape or evasion of prison rules, referencing ­cinema’s ability to represent the world, as does the work’s title, which is a quotation from Roberto Rossellini‘s Europa 51 (1952). Ingrid Bergman, working in a factory, sees her fellow-workers and says, “I thought I was seeing convicts”; Farocki explains that “the film has great meaning for me because it emphasizes an attitude of not wanting to acquiesce to a system of injustice” (2004: 300), but now, he suggests, “With the increase in electronic control structures, everyday life will become just as hard to portray and dramatize as everyday work already is” (2002: 107).

Figure 27.7  Titles on lower screen explain the image of supermarket customers’ movements, “Click on any customer and his or her shopping list appears,” while the yellow dots represent prison inmates who have been outfitted with electronic ankle bracelets, “Click on any inmate and learn his or her identity.” Farocki asks: “What can be accelerated and increased in prison?’ I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (Harun Farocki, 2001, produced by Generali Foundation and Harun Farocki Filmproduktion).

596

Elizabeth Cowie

Figure 27.8  William Martinez has been shot and lies dead for over nine minutes before guards carry his body away. I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (Harun Farocki, 2001, produced by Generali Foundation and Harun Farocki Filmproduktion).

In the computer simulation imagery he presents, Farocki also addresses Deleuze’s “control society,” of “dividuals,” using the reconstruction of customer movement through a supermarket based on statistics that map probable routes of purchasing, he juxtaposes these images with a real-time electronic representation of prisoners in the exercise yard where green dots represent inmates wearing electronic ankle bracelets; clicking on a dot brings up the information on the prisoner (Figure 27.8). The work is genealogical in bringing together a (hi)story from official and unofficial “archives,” making incongruent connections through placing together contexts and perspectives normally kept separate. As Christa Blümlinger suggests, “the displacement of these specialised, little-known archives into the milieu of art exhibitions or experimental cinema is like an act of ‘ready-made’ in itself and represents an awareness of the exhibition value of an image” (2004: 321). Farocki commented: I show these pictures in double projection, which results in a softer montage. The simultaneous words and images are suggestive rather than descriptive. Apart from this I try to be spontaneous, like the sudden ideas one gets during good conversations. This is also supposed to counter the merciless logic of execution. (Farocki, 2004: 297)

While Farocki incorporates fictional film, Hollywood and art cinema, Manu Luksch’s 50-minute film Faceless (2007) introduces fiction into the CCTV



The World Viewed

597

recordings themselves, to address issues of resistance and memory. The film is part of a multi-platform project that she developed between 2002 and 2008, exploring London as the “most surveilled city on earth” through a series of installations, including Mapping CCTV in Whitehall (2008), showing the estimated range of 300 CCTV cameras within the SOCPA (Serious and Organized Crime and Police Act) restricted zone around Parliament in Whitehall, and a recording of one camera’s unencrypted transmission.16 Adhering to the requirement of her “Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers” that “The filmmaker is not permitted to introduce any cameras or lighting into the location,” the filmed material we see in Faceless is CCTV ­recordings acquired under the UK Data Protection Act which places a legal obligation on CCTV operators to provide applicants with a copy of any recordings which qualify as personal data, namely, those in which they have been caught on the camera. The film’s medium is thus not simply a raw material of video, or captured light, but images that only exist because of contingent and particular social and legal circumstances, which Luksch calls “images with a legal superstructure” or “legal readymades” (Luksch and Patel, 2007: 73). The film’s organizing trope is the facelessness of the other people in the requisitioned CCTV images – as required by law, their features are obscured by oval discs, unidentifiable and without identity. What we see in the real time of CCTV is the recording of carefully choreographed and planned performances staged before CCTV cameras at carefully chosen sites. The film’s uncanniness lies in being both an actual reality of the ordinary spaces of the city where any of us might be caught on a security camera, and a fictional world. We see the actions and movements of people in real time, documented by the CCTV, as evidenced by the time dating, enacted as part of the “science-fiction fairy tale” (Luksch and Patel, 2007: 73) of the new “RealTime Calendar” that was instituted to rescue people from anxiety about the future and guilt over the past that caused great unhappiness (Figure 27.9 and Figure 27.10). The present was continuously in short supply, explains Tilda Swinton’s voice-over, but “In the luminous world of the New Machine, each moment of RealTime saturates consciousness. There is no memory, no anticipation, there is no past, so there can be no guilt and no future, therefore, no anxiety or fear.” As a result, without memory or anticipation, faces have become vestigial. The film’s sci-fi solution is to only live in the present. Monitored by overseers, people exist alternately as workers and as consumers, while their children, raised separately, are taught to live in “RealTime” that, the voice-over tells us, “orients the life of every citizen. Eating, resting, going to work, getting married – every act is tied to RealTime. And every act leaves a trace of data – a footprint in the snow of noise.” But this is not human history, for without memory there is no knowledge of what has been, of what is past, and thus lost, or of what could be in the anticipation of what might be in a future time. Suddenly, however, a woman recovers her face, and after receiving a letter at work that urges her to dream, she begins to remember – which also brings the anguish of loss – but as a result she must flee, as an overseer is alerted to eliminate her. Escaping the gunshot, however, she then encounters “spectral” children who have escaped their “synchrocenters” and are no longer traceable. And she meets the sender of the letter, an escaped overseer and her husband in their life before RealTime, who tells of their past together, and their child. He

598

Elizabeth Cowie

Figure 27.9  Tilda Swinton’s voice-over narrates, “Another echo … She emerges from its spell. The pulse of RealTime impels her again.” Faceless (Manu Luksch, 2007, produced by Ambient Information Systems and Amour Fou Filmproduktion).

Figure 27.10  “The pulse of RealTime orients the life of every citizen. Eating, resting, going to work, getting married – every act is tied to RealTime. And every act leaves a trace of data, a footprint in the snow of noise.” Faceless (Manu Luksch, 2007, produced by Ambient Information Systems and Amour Fou Filmproduktion).

tells the woman she must destroy the New Machine by attacking its blind spot. Successful, the restoration of memory brings a different happiness, and instead of the regimented movements of dancers seen at the beginning and at times through the film, its conclusion shows freely moving people and children who can now make their future differently.



The World Viewed

599

Faceless engages with CCTV as part of our imaginative world in our everyday encounter with recorded life everywhere around us, not only by introducing the uncanny possibility of seeing oneself otherwise, but also in its staging of the way we may modify our behavior. At the same time CCTV incites anxiety about security, about being safe in the world, as well as fear of being controlled by it gaze. In its fictional scenario, however, it explores the dystopia of escape into digital “now time” and the dataveillance it enables.

Documentary Surveillance Documentary filming, like CCTV, imposes its gaze, demanding that the world be available not just to observation, but also to being recorded. In catching life unawares, documentary also seeks to “catch people out,” revealing themselves in ways they had not sought or intended. It subjects not only the documentary participants that are its objects, but also the spectator subsequently, who cannot do otherwise than look, as the camera has. Neither we nor they can evade its gaze. These important issues of ethics for documentary are too often addressed only as a question of consent in relation to participants, and not in terms of what is involved in waiving the right to determine how and by whom one is seen. For the spectator, however, the subjecting documentary gaze can engage us in these ethical issues, as Wiseman clearly does in Titicut Follies, when he subjects us to a sequence of over six minutes that follows one inmate. Jim, naked, his hands covering his genitals, is shaved by warders, drinks from a basin tap, and walks back to his cell with the warders as he shouts unintelligibly. He appears victim to the camera’s surveilling gaze, which zooms into close-up, then back out again as he paces his cell, alternately facing and then turning away from the camera that all the while keeps him under inspection. The extended duration of these shots is conventionally excessive, becoming for the spectator interminable, inescapable. Playing to the camera perhaps, the warders question Jim about his past as a teacher, and he replies lucidly, naming schools and colleges, and invoking a life of normality. The final shots show Jim making direct eye contact with the camera’s lens, addressing us, thus further queering our position as voyeurspectators. Our wish to see and know all is here turned against us, as we see too much, and come to know what we may have wished to remain ignorant of. Gary Hill, in Blind Spot (2003, 12.27 min.) explores the filming gaze as subjecting, for, Brighenti suggests, “the camera provides a vision that cannot be challenged, a gaze which is never averted,” invoking the “asymmetrical vision of a visibility-ascontrol” (2010: 180). We watch a Maghrebi man in traditional dress caught on camera on a Marseilles street as he leaves a house, turning away from the camera to wave at someone further up the street, the camera slowly zooming in to him, as he turns his head again towards the camera, his face now seen in a large close-up, revealing a series of expressions on his face that we may read as reactions of curiosity, fear, and anger. The scene is transformed from “life caught unawares” not only by the man’s look back at the camera but also by Hill’s slowing down of the seen,

600

Elizabeth Cowie

extending a brief moment into more than 12 minutes that become imposed on the spectator as a contemplative spectacle until broken by the man’s returned gaze. Documentary surveillance is addressed by the photographer, sculptor, and video artist William Noland in a series of works that show life filmed unawares. His series Surveillance 1, Surveillance 2, and Surveillance 3 present the observing gaze and ambient sound of his hidden camera recordings as a watching through framing, ­juxtapositions, camera zooming and editing that invite the viewer to reflect on the found ironies and paradoxes of contemporary society. Surveillance 3 shows scenes of police, and protesters awaiting the acceptance speech of President George Bush, and a young worker, in preparation for the launch of a new Diesel clothing store, cleaning the interior surface of the store’s window. This young worker, Noland comments, is “safe within a hermetic, commercial universe, sealed off from the tumultuous events occurring just outside.” The quiet dignity of simple labor, sensual and elegant, is ­juxtaposed with the edgy standoff between impassioned crowds and the dutifully stoic police officers.” In Occulted (2006), filmed on London’s streets, it is surveillance and the obliviousness of the surveilled that Noland observes. Noting the widespread surveillance of CCTV in London he writes, “A populace that willingly submits to surveillance is observed, revealed and exposed in ways that leave us to ponder the effects of suspicion on our interior lives.”17

The Archive and Surveillance in Documentary Surveillance and CCTV recordings are an archive of evidential material that can be deployed forensically, to produce an account in a court of law of how an event occurred, who was responsible, and how was it carried out. The event can then be judged as a crime, and the perpetrator as thief, murderer, a spy, or “terrorist.” Any visual and auditory record can become historical or forensic evidence, whether ­television news, or our own snapshots and video innocently recorded that can become, after the event, potential forensic evidence. One of the most famous ­examples of this is Abraham Zapruder’s film, on silent 16 mm color stock, of US President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, which thereby also captured the President’s assassination, yet while analysis of this footage showed where the bullet came from, it could not enable the perpetrator(s) to be identified. In contrast, George Halliday’s video recording of the extremely violent beating of African-American Rodney Glen King in 1991 by Los Angeles police officers following a high-speed car chase clearly identified the men, but not whether the excessive force was “reasonable,” and they were initially acquitted, although a later Federal prosecution secured the conviction of three of the officers. Such material has now been termed “sousveillance” by Steve Mann (1998). It is the use of the audiovisual as forensic evidence in documentary that I want to consider here through examining Errol Morris’s two films The Fog of War (2003), which investigates the role of the recorded seen and heard in military decision-­ making, and Standard Operating Procedure (2008), which examines photographic



The World Viewed

601

forensic evidence of war crime. Morris is a documentary filmmaker especially ­interested in evidence, both that of testimony and of the material and the visible, and these films critically address forensic visual evidence while also exploring “forensically,” examining, comparing, and evaluating film and video recordings, for which, in Standard Operating Procedure, the digital and its algorithms have become central. The Fog of War presents Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, addressing the camera, and explaining what he has learnt from his own participation in key events of the Second World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War, and through his work for Ford Motor Company. Morris presents this as 11 “history lessons” extracted from McNamara’s account and that are also, he tells Homi Bhabha, intentionally ironic (Bhabha, 2008). McNamara’s words are accompanied by analog archive photos, audio and film recordings that are often digitally manipulated, derived from news and film archives, the presidents’ libraries and archives, and, centrally for my discussion here, the Defense Visual Information Center’s operation records, surveillance, and reconnaissance material. The film presents McNamara’s verbal account, including remarks that he intended to be off-camera, as a performance of history alongside the seen and heard of archive material. This, while initially appearing to be illustrative of his words, becomes at key moments an implicit critique through the ironies that arise from the dramatic use of this footage in the film. Lesson 5, “Proportionality should be a guideline in war,” centers on the US blanket bombing with incendiaries of Japanese cities at the end of the Second World War ordered by General LeMay, McNamara’s commanding officer. We see archive footage – filmed as operational records – of the devastated cities alongside statistics stating that 60–98% were destroyed, and a comparison with US cities of a similar size. At first these accompany McNamara’s voice-over, then continue afterward with an accelerating pace of image and music, dramatizing the emotional meaning, and critiquing the rationalism of LeMay’s strategy and its modernist efficiency. The future possible but unrealized forensic role of the archive footage is acknowledged when McNamara observes, “LeMay said that if we’d lost the war we’d have all been prosecuted as war criminals, and I think he’s right, he and I believe I, were behaving as war criminals.” The film echoes here McNamara’s views earlier in Lesson 1, “Empathy with the Enemy” and Lesson 2, “Rationality will not save us,” where magnified archive surveillance photographs of the USSR’s missile sites in Cuba are examined by a human observer seen in enlarged close-up by Morris’s camera. Here, while the panoptic technique afforded knowledge, it could not guide the response, which instead, McNamara argued, required empathy – for by putting himself in Khruschev’s shoes he understood how to develop a strategy to protect the United States by forcing the dismantling of the sites through giving something to Khruschev, namely the ability to claim that he had stopped the Americans invading Cuba. Lesson 7, “Belief and seeing are both often wrong,” is also the lesson of Morris’s own body of film work, and as well it questions the very use of archive material itself and our belief that we can see, can read it “correctly.” McNamara illustrates this

602

Elizabeth Cowie

lesson with the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the development of full-blown US military action in Vietnam, when an attack on the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964 by the North Vietnamese navy was followed two days later by a mistaken reading of information that the ship was again under attack. In archive footage we see the officers looking at the sonar, and hear the voice of Admiral Sharp declaring to Washington that there were at least nine torpedoes in the water, adding “apparently,” indicating that these might be mistaken sonar readings, and when asked to confirm if there had been torpedoes he replies “no doubt about that. I think” (Figure 27.11). President Johnson, McNamara explains, authorized the bombing of North Vietnam in response, mistakenly believing that a second attack had occurred, and this supported his belief that it was a conscious decision on the part of the North Vietnamese political and military leaders to escalate the conflict and an indication that they would not stop short of winning – we were wrong, but we had a mindset that led to that action, and we were wrong, with such heavy consequences.

Both the sonar reading and Johnson’s reading of what it implied of North Vietnamese intentions were wrong. Morris, responding to the videotape of a US Marine shooting an Iraqi prisoner in Fallujah, writes, “Unhappily, an unerring fact of human nature is that we

Figure 27.11  The record of Admiral Sharpe, talking to General Burchinal is heard over shots of the sonar operators, as he explains that some of the torpedo reports appeared doubtful due to “freak weather effects and overeager sonar men,” but asked whether there was a torpedo attack he replies, “No doubt about that … I think.” Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003, produced by Sony Pictures Classics, Radical Media, SenArt Films, and The Globe Department Store).



The World Viewed

603

habitually reject the evidence of our own senses. If we want to believe something, then we often find a way to do so regardless of evidence to the contrary. Believing is seeing and not the other way around” (Morris, 2004). In Standard Operating Procedure the visual material is not surveillance film, but the shocking digital “trophy” photographs taken by US military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison that constituted visible evidence of orchestrated and illegal physical and mental abuse of the detainees by those personnel participating and by those who recorded it. What Morris investigates, controversially, is not the abuse visibly evidenced (that amounted to torture and thus a war crime, for which 11 men and women were convicted) but the role of belief and seeing.18 Through interviews using his interrotron device, he presents the stories of five of the perpetrators, together with the accounts of their investigation by four personnel from the Military Police, the Army Criminal Investigation Division, and by the commanding officer of the prison, Brig. General Janis Karpinski. Unlike Corcoran prison, or Guantanamo Bay detention center, there was no CCTV at Abu Ghraib that could corroborate the claims made that such treatment was widespread and encouraged as “standard operating procedures.” As a result, “The Abu Ghraib pictures attest to torture while providing alibis for the powerful. In this sense too, they are less comprehensive than they may seem, as secretive as they are revelatory” (White, 2009: 5). The film performs these images in three ways: framing them with a white border, as if they were from the era of black and white analog photographs, which are seen both digitally and as hard copy prints; by animating the scenes in the photographs, in stylized and dramatic re-enactments, as well as the prison space, and Sabrina Harman’s letter; and by digital manipulation. Special Agent Brent Pack, a military investigator, undertook the forensic analysis of the 12,000 photographs, identifying those engaged in possible prisoner abuse, and those in the area at the time. Interviewed by Morris for the film, he says, “The pictures spoke a thousand words,” but the tying of them to a time, a place, and to individuals was needed, which he achieved by examining the digitally embedded metadata (Figure 27.12). This enabled him to determine when photos were taken, by which camera, and the duration of some of the incidents, and the extent of the effort involved in the actions of the perpetrators recorded in the images. From this information, and the images themselves, a view could be taken as to whether individual interactions were a violation of military protocol or on the contrary were “standard operating procedure.” He interjects at one point, “How could all this go on without anyone noticing?”19 thus assuming the absence of a disciplinary gaze that would have intervened but thereby pointing to the – ostensibly rogue – disciplinary gaze that drew forth these actions but which has remained veiled in the subsequent criminal investigations. He says, however, that all he can do is present to the court what he knows to be factual, not politics or personal feeling. Morris intercuts Pack’s address to camera with computer-generated imaging as if entering the computer’s hard drive, with numbers representing the time codes that were extracted from the metadata – we might see this as the data aesthetics that Sharon Lin Tay discusses in Chapter  26 in this section. These numbers, however, are then superimposed on

604

Elizabeth Cowie

Figure 27.12  In voice-over, Special Agent Brent Pack explains: “the one time-setting that did stay constant is what we call metadata … a big two-dollar word for information about information, pictures have information inside the file that tells you about when that file was created, what software created it, the exposure settings …” Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008, produced by Participant Media (as Participant Productions) and Sony Pictures Classics).

some of the photographs themselves, giving visual representation to the data analysis that was conducted, and which stands in for the absent CCTV or data surveillance. In contrast, later in the film, it is an indexical truth that Pack identifies when he comments about one photo that, “The facial expressions kinda set the tone for what they were thinking and feeling at the time, you look in their eyes and they look like they’re having fun. This scene is what sealed it for me.” In his review in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert (2008) quotes Sergeant Javal Davis who says in the film, “Pictures only show you a fraction of a second, you don’t see forward and you don’t see backward you don’t see outside the frame.” For Ebert, Jarval is expressing the central questions of the film: “Why do these photos exist, why were they taken and what reality do they reflect? What do we think about these people?” For Morris, the film investigates self-deception, and the believing that is seeing on the part of all the participants. The data analysis no less than the indexical record are seen through “belief,” are organized ways of “observing” that constitute, in Foucault’s terms, the space of the visible. What Morris introduces is, in Daney’s words, the visual – but also the words – as “both more and less than itself ” through the multiple perspectives that make incomplete any one “view.” Bhabha comments that “In the best sense, Errol Morris’s films are disturbing works of



The World Viewed

605

truth, history and art. They renew our hope that new ways of seeing can unsettle old ways of believing” (2008. Morris in his films, while not telling us how to see and know truly, nevertheless holds to this desire.

Conclusion It has been argued here that the seeing of surveillance is distinct from the watching, the observing that produces disciplining. The CCTV camera’s gaze does not watch, it becomes surveillance when it is analyzed, either in the real time of an event, or subsequently in a forensic examination. Our response to CCTV is imaginative, whether experiencing it as the embodied gaze of a person viewing it who thereby sees us, or on the contrary speculating that we remain unseen, because its gaze missed us or is not being observed or recorded. Documentary film, in contrast, is the record of a watching, observing, gaze that is organized to present a particular way of knowing, and thus knowledge. In this it is part of the disciplinary discourses identified by Foucault. Its deployment of recorded reality, however, always includes more and less than was observed by the filmmakers. Jean-Louis Comolli, filmmaker and film theorist, writes that the documentary must assume cinema’s destiny, in a reference to André Bazin’s “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” and thus have as its aesthetic goal our conversion into spectators of the sort of representations that are more than imperfect and less than deceptive, representations that can’t quite tame the world. The world would be glimpsed in those representations that fail in their effects and miss their object. (Comolli, 1999: 42)

For documentary, he argues, “has to invent forms that give it a hold on what has not yet been grasped cinematically. Put it this way: it has an obligation to create” (43). The films and art works discussed in this essay: as imaginative speculation; as embodied encounter with video; as sculptural; as genealogical; and as critique, demonstrate documentary’s fraught but productive relationship to surveillance, interrogating our culture of surveillance, and the self-surveillance it engenders. They produce images and sounds that challenge assumptions of the spaces of visibility as being knowable, as inherently knowledge – connaissance. They refigure our experience of the “sensible” and thereby disturb the hierarchy of its distribution. Rancière suggests that “Images change our gaze and the landscape of the possible if they are not anticipated by their meaning and do not anticipate their effects” (2009: 105). While as documentary these works assert meanings, and seek effects, these are each incomplete, thereby engaging us in the gaps of meaning, and thus a certain dissensus, in the contingent apprehension of the unincluded, that is, of an evidential, and thus an apprehended, that is not authorized as the factual known.

606

Elizabeth Cowie

Notes 1 Educating Essex was a seven-part series made for Channel 4, and broadcast in 2011. It follows a group of 16-year-olds preparing to taking public examinations (GCSEs) and their teachers, at Passmores School in Harlow, Essex, which has succeeded in achieving strong performances from its very wide range of students: a successful school in a challenging area. Channel 4’s website explains: “The school was rigged with 65 fixed cameras – from the corridors to the canteen, and from the headteacher’s office to the detention hall – to reveal every detail of daily life.” 2 Panopticon; Or, the Inspection-house: Containing the Idea of a New Principle of Construction Applicable to Any Sort of Establishment, In Which Persons of Any Description Are to Be Kept Under Inspection; and In Particular to Penitentiary-houses …, Dublin and London, 3 vols., 1791 (republished as Bentham, 1843). Calls for, and specific proposals, for changes had been made earlier by the great prison reformer, John Howard, in The State of the Prisons, 1777. 3 Architectural historian Philip Steadman (2007), however, has shown that prisons incorporating the principle of the Panopticon were fundamentally flawed in their architectural realization due to problems of geometry and hence optical view, for no viewing point could be obtained which was not itself viewable by the prisoners, who were also able to see each other. Bentham himself realized these problems and sought to resolve them in his own designs. (In fact perhaps only one such prison was fully based on the Panopticon, Stateville, in Illinois, opened in 1925.) 4 Bentham also discusses the application of the principle of the Panopticon to other institutions: Letter XVIII: Manufactories, Letter XIX: Mad-houses, Letter XX: Hospitals, Letter XXI: Schools. 5 Bentham sets this out in “Postscript, Part I. Containing Further Particulars and Alterations Relative to the Plan of Construction Originally Proposed; Principally Adapted to the Purpose of a Panopticon Penitentiary-house. Section III: Of Separation As Between the Sexes” and in “Section IV: Of Separation Into Companies and Classes.” 6 I have drawn here on the excellent examination of the gaze in Foucault by Véronique Voruz (2012). 7 Documentary becomes a discourse of knowledge-power when deployed within a particular discursive discipline. 8 “Let us be more wary of the dangerous old conceptual fairy-tale which has set up a ‘pure will-less, painless, timeless, subject of knowledge’, let us be wary of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge as such’: here we are asked to think an eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye turned in no direction at all, an eye where the active and interpretative powers are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeing-something, so it is an absurdity and nonconcept of eye that is demanded. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; the more affects we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’ ” (Nietzsche, 1994: 92). 9 Simon Menner’s website, http://www.simonmenner.com/Seiten/Stasi/indexStasi.html, accessed August 9, 2014, and solo show June 24–August 20, 2011, “Images from the Secret Stasi Archives,” Morgen Contemporary, Berlin, http://www.morgen-contempo rary.com/index.php/lang-en/simon-menner-ausstellung, accessed August 9, 2014.



The World Viewed

607

10 See http://disturber.net/focus-on-trevor-paglen/, accessed August 10, 2014. A related project is “Reversing the Panopticon” by Deborah Natsios and John Young in Cryptome, which publishes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular, material on cryptology; dual-use technologies; and national security and intelligence open, secret, and classified documents. Cartome, a newly inaugurated companion site to Cryptome, is an archive of spatial and geographic documents on ­privacy, cryptography, dual-use technologies, and national security and intelligence communicated by imagery systems: cartography, photography, photogrammetry, steganography, climatography, seismography, geography, camouflage, maps, images, drawings, charts, diagrams, imagery intelligence (IMINT), and their reverse-panopticon and counter-deception potential. See “Reversing the Panopticon,” http://www.cryptome. org/cartome/reverse-panopticon.htm, accessed August 9, 2014. 11 Discussed by Marquez and Cançado (2010), the film is viewable on Vimeo. 12 The first film, A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, was a prototype and was completed in 1968; the second film, Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero, was completed in 1977. 13 Bentham himself identified this feature in his project, for recognizing that it might be neither possible nor desirable to ensure continuous observation, “the next thing to be wished for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so” (Letter I: Idea of the Inspection Principle; Bentham, 1843: 69). 14 It also produces, Lyon argues, what he calls “panopticommodity” whereby the participant’s individuality becomes the entertainment commodity and “people market themselves.” Self-disclosure apparently equates with freedom and authenticity. “But you individuate only by submitting to mass surveillance … we believe that our customized products express our individuality and our creativity” (2007: 8). In such individuation we become “dividuals” in Deleuze’s sense. 15 See on this Catherine Taft’s discussion of the work, and interview with Nauman (Taft, 2008: 182). A similar engagement of the viewer in a doubling and difference through CCTV is produced by Michael Snow’s installation De La (1972), which iterates his film La Région centrale (1971), made on 16mm, with video; originally the machine mount designed for Snow by Montreal technician Pierre Abeloos to enable the highly complex rotation of the 16mm camera that filmed La Région centrale, in De La, it is a CCTV system, installed in the gallery, the camera moving in programmed patterns relaying its results to four monitors, one in a corner with its screen toward the machine sculpture situated on a pedestal in the center. 16 A map of the hundreds of cameras in the zone was made over two days of observation. The second part involved mapping the range of one of these cameras, no. 40 in Villiers Street, by intercepting its signal as it was transmitted wirelessly without encryption. As passers-by entered the marked area covered by camera no. 40, they were alerted to the camera’s presence and handed a copy of the map of CCTV cameras in Whitehall, http://www.ambienttv.net/content/?q=mappingcctv, accessed August 10, 2014. Manu Luksch (2010) discusses the film in conversation with Seda Gürses and Michelle Teran. 17 See Noland’s website, where short extracts of these works can also be viewed on this site: http://www.williamnoland.com/video/watch/occulted/.

608

Elizabeth Cowie

18 Standard Operating Procedure, while unsuccessful at the box office, has received ­extensive academic critical attention. See for example, Judith Butler (2009); Julia Lesage (2009); the dossier in Jump Cut, 52 (2010) of papers first presented at SCMS 2010, by Bill Nichols, Linda Williams, Irina Leimbacher, and Jonathan Kahana; Caetlin BensonAllott (2009); and Kris Fallon (2013). Kahana, focusing on the interviews, valuably addresses its complexity, arguing that “the film places the testimonial performances of the Abu Ghraib ‘bad apples’ within the discourse of trauma and the linguistics of the excuse” (2010: 1). 19 Pack’s words in the film are often voiced over images, and may not be in the ­chronological order of his interview with Morris, hence what seems an interjection here may be an effect of Morris’s editing.

References Benson-Allott, Caetlin (2009) Standard Operating Procedure: Mediating Torture. Film Quarterly, 62(4), 39–44. Bentham, Jeremy (1843) The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring, vol. 4. Edinburgh: William Tait. Bhabha, Homi (2008) The Anti-Post-Modern Post-Modernist. Conversation with Errol Morris, http://www.errolmorris.com/content/lecture/theantipost.html, accessed August 10, 2014. Blümlinger, Christa (2004) Harun Farocki: Critical Strategies. In Elsaesser, Thomas (ed.) Harun Farocki: Working the Sight-lines, pp. 315–322. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Bresson, Robert (1950) Notes on Cinematography, trans. Jonathan Griffin. New York: Urizen Books. Brighenti, Andrea Mubi (2010) Artveillance: At the Crossroads of Art and Surveillance. Surveillance & Society, 7(2),175–186. Butler, Judith (2009) Sexual Politics, Torture and Time. In Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso. Cavell, Stanley (1979) The World Viewed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chang, Helen (2011) Trevor Paglen. Frieze, 138 (April), http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/ trevor-paglen/, accessed August 10, 2014. Comolli, Jean-Louis (1999) Documentary Journey to the Land of the Head Shrinkers. October, 90, 36–49. Corner, John (2002) Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions. Television and New Media, 3, 259–269. Daney, Serge (1991) Montage obligé. La guerre, le Golfe et le petit écran. In Daney, Devant la  recrudescence des vols de sacs à main: cinéma, télévision, information (1988–1991). Lyon: Aléas. Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1992) Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, 59, 3–7. Duguet, Anne-Marie (1988) Dispositifs. Communications, 48, 221–242. Ebert, Roger (2008) Review of Standard Operating Procedure. May 1, http://www.rogerebert. com/reviews/standard-operating-procedure-2008, accessed August 10, 2014. Fallon, Kris (2013) Archives Analog and Digital: Errol Morris and Documentary Film in the Digital Age. Screen, 54(1), 20–43.



The World Viewed

609

Farocki, Harun (2002) Controlling Observation. In Levin, Thomas Y., Frohne, Ursula, and Weibel, Peter (eds.) CNTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, pp. 102–107. Karlsruhe and Cambridge, MA: Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany and MIT. Farocki, Harun (2004) Nine Minutes in the Yard: A Conversation with Harun Farocki (with Rembert Hüser). In Elsaesser, Thomas (ed.) Harun Farocki: Working the Sight-lines, pp. 297–314. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Foucault, Michel (1975) The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel (1996) The Eye of Power. In Lotringer, Sylvère (ed.) Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–1984), pp. 226–240. New York: Semiotexte. Foucault, Michel (1998) Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In Faubion, James D. (ed.) Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol, 2, pp. 369–391. New York: New Press. Foucault, Michel (2001a) Truth and Juridical Forms. In Faubion, James D. (ed.) Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 3, pp. 1–89. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel (2001b) The Subject and Power. In Faubion, James D. (ed.) Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 3, pp. 326–348. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, ed. Michel Senellart. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2011) Leçons sur la volunté de savoir: Cours au Collège de France (1970–71) suivi de Le savoir d’Oedipe. Paris: Gallimard/Seuil. Kahana, Jonathan (2010) Speech Images: Standard Operating Procedure and the Staging of Interrogation. Jump Cut, 52. Leimbacher, Irina (2010) Response to Papers and Comments on Standard Operating Procedure. Jump Cut, 52. Lesage, Julia (2009) Torture Documentaries. Jump Cut, 51. Luksch, Manu (2010) A Trialogue on Interventions in Surveillance Space: Seda Gürses in Conversation with Michelle Teran and Manu Luksch. Surveillance & Society, 7(2), 165–174. Luksch, Manu and Patel, Mukul (2007) Faceless: Chasing the Data Shadow. In Stocker, G. and Schöpf, C. (eds.) Goodbye Privacy: Ars Electronica, pp. 72–78. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Lyon, David (2006) The Search for Surveillance Theories. In Lyon (ed.) Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond, 3–19. Portland, OR: Willan Publishing Lyon, David (2007) Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mann, S. (1998) “Reflectionism” and “Diffusionism”: New Tactics for Deconstructing the Video Surveillance Superhighway. Leonardo, 31(2), 93–102. Marquez, Renata and Cançado, Wellington (2010) Myopia Index. Surveillance & Society, 7(2), 126–143. Mathiesen, Thomas (1997) The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault’s “Panopticon” Revisited. Theoretical Criminology, 1(2), 215–234. Morris, Errol (2004) Not Every Picture Tells a Story. New York Times, November 20. Muir, Lorna (2012) Control Space? Cinematic Representations of Surveillance Space Between Discipline and Control. Surveillance & Society, 9(3), 263–279. Nichols, Bill (2010) Feelings of Revulsion and the Limits of Academic Discourse. Jump Cut, 52

610

Elizabeth Cowie

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1994) On the Genealogy of Morality [1887], ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paglen, Trevor (2010) Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes. Reading, PA: Aperture. Rancière, J. (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum. Rancière, J. (2006) Thinking Between Disciplines: An Aesthetics of Knowledge. Parrhesia, 1, 1–12. Rancière, J. (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso. Rancière, J. (2010) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum. Schöny, Roland (2008) Within the Apparatus of Control: On the Enduring Fascination of Surveillance Aesthetics. Springerin, 4/08, 1–4. Steadman, P. (2007) The Contradictions of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon Penitentiary. Journal of Bentham Studies, 9,1–31. Taft, Catherine (2008) Interview with Bruce Nauman. In Phillips, Glenn (ed.) California Video: Artists and Histories, pp. 182–185. Los Angeles: Getty Publications. Voruz, V. (2012) The Gaze in Surveillance Societies. In Golder, B. (ed.) Michel Foucault: Law, Government, Rights, pp. 127–150. London: Routledge. Wahlberg, Malin (2004) Inscription and Re-framing: At the Editing Table of Harun Farocki. Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 73(1), 16–26. Whitaker, Reginald (1999) The End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance is Becoming a Reality. New York: The New Press. White, Rob (2009) Editor’s Notebook. Film Quarterly, 62(4), 4–5. Williams, Linda (2010) “Cluster Fuck”: The Forcible Frame in Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure. Jump Cut, 52.

28

Surveillance in the Service of Narrative Brian Winston

Video Forensics The pages of Evidence Technology Magazine reveal the consanguinity of academic close textual analysis to the “techniques” used by police and prosecutors for the forensic evaluation of video imagery – largely gleaned by surveillance cameras – in the courtroom. “Surveillance” involves the act of watching, or spying, with the specific intention of keeping guard. It implies those watched are suspects or prisoners who have no control over – or even necessary knowledge of – the processes of surveillance or the presence of surveillants. From the time of its introduction to the language in the early nineteenth century, the word has connoted “superintendence.” Today, in its automated photographic mode, it describes what has become a ubiquitous presence in the public sphere. However, the sheer proliferation of images presents a somewhat daunting practical task for the authorities charged with such superintendence. Forensically, there is a pressing need for “trained” help (“video analysts”) because here is no one film-text awaiting sophisticated theoretical analysis. Rather, police regularly have to confront a mass of recordings, huge datasets. As retired FBI Agent and director of strategic operations for the University of Indianapolis, Dr. Tom Christenberry,1 has pointed out: “Statistically, there is probably more video evidence at most crime scenes than any other evidence. The average person today is captured on video 16 to 20 times a day – and does not even know it” (Garrison, 2007: 24). But processing this data is no easy matter, as another ex-officer and video analysis expert, Grant Fredericks, explains:

A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

612

Brian Winston

You might only have seven frames – say one-third of a second – from one camera at a time. What you do is shuttle through a tape slowly to see if one of the cameras captured an image of interest. That is very time-consuming and impractical. (Garrison, 2007: 23)

This is obviously so. There was, to take a random example, a riot following a Stanley Cup ice-hockey game between the Vancouver Kanucks and the Boston Bruins in Vancouver on the night of June 15, 2011, involving an estimated 150,000 people. The cameras across the city, hundreds of them, captured 5000 hours of “evidence” and current developments in digital motion detection and image recognition were pressed into service to sift through this tsunami of images. The Vancouver PD Integrated Riot Investigators Team (IRIT) used an Avid-based data analysis system to find and isolate the frames (should one add: “supposedly”?) showing rioters committing criminal acts from among the mass of less “interesting” images. 163 charges against 60 suspects followed (Garrison, 2012: 10). Clearly, forensic video analysis is a twenty-first century growth area. The University of Indianapolis was involved with the police after the Stanley Cup affair and is a world leader for the training of image analyst experts. Since 2007, it has housed the Digital Multimedia Evidence Processing Lab of the Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Video Association (LEVA). Grant Fredericks regards it as “the best equipped forensic-video training facility in the world.” The laboratory, with some $300,000 of equipment, is within the University’s Department of Criminal Justice but structured training had been going on under FBI auspices in various places since 2000. More than 1000 experts had taken such courses before the first UIndy class of 2007 – taught by Fredericks and including law enforcement personnel from the Louisville, Houston, and Minneapolis police departments and specialists from the Target Corporation and the Forensic Science Service – graduated. The lab can be activated for use by the Department of Homeland Security in the case of a national emergency … There’s little doubt the lab is capable. In digital storage, it has an immediate capacity of 28 terabytes, and the potential for expansion to several petabytes.2 … The U.S. Department of Justice and International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) recently announced that four operational forensic video laboratories are to be located in the states of Massachusetts, Washington, Texas, and Ohio. (Garrison, 2007).

Clearly, leaving aside any admiration for the University of Indianapolis’s entrepreneurial flair in securing this training niche, there are implications arising from the authorities’ acquisition of such technology which might cause well-grounded civil liberty and other concerns. I want to argue, though, that a full-fledged Big Brother panic, grounded in technicist assumptions, is not yet totally justified. For one thing, the capacity for computerized motion analysis is still limited. In fact, as the nascent campaign against robot warfare notes, there is presently no recognition system available able to meet even the basic requirement of Article 36 of the Geneva Convention, that weapons must be able to distinguish between combatants and



Surveillance in the Service of Narrative

613

civilians. As Noel Sharkey, the robotics and artificial intelligence expert behind this “Stop Killer Robots Campaign,” says: “We are struggling to get [robots] to distinguish between a human being and a car. We have already seen utter incompetence in the use of drones” (McVeigh, 2013: 11). Far more importantly, though, cinema studies’ interests and understandings suggest surveillance might always have its limits however good motion analysis gets to be. It is forever going to be constrained by unavoidable factors intrinsic to the processes of representation. Cinema studies’ considerations of surveillance are bound to be counter-productive from the point of view of enhancing forensic techniques. The consanguinity of cinema studies and police training is, thus, far from perfect. Basically, the semiotic vexations of the former do not, self-evidently, much concern the later. Academic insights highlight a limitation to the dystopian potential of the technology. Fredericks might ask (in an article for Evidence Technology Magazine) “Can Video Evidence Be Trusted?” (Fredericks, 2010); but his business (he is a “consultant” on such matters) clearly demands a strong affirmative. For cinema studies the reverse is likely the case: no image can be trusted – certainly not as “silent witness” – on its face. And it is that, rather than the fundamental issues of the human rights of liberty and privacy, which is the focus here. Questions of documentary authenticity can be said to be fundamentally raised by surveillance; but this is otherwise without prejudice to the issue of rights with which I am not here directly concerned, but have explored in A Right to Offend (Winston, 2012: 245–253).

The Question You Need to Answer: Can Video Evidence Be Trusted? Consider the tape, made by bystander George Holliday, documenting the LAPD’s abuse of Rodney King on March 3, 1991. Bill Nichols, in his analysis of this most notorious of all forensic video incidents, points out the obvious truth: in the King incident, prosecution, media and, it would seem, the public all “neglected to consider the image as symptom in need of diagnosis” (Nichols, 1994: 22). When the police defense lawyers did just this, the commonsense meaning of the images could be, at least as a matter of reasonable doubt, reversed: and it was. The police were acquitted.3 Of course, the jury was racist and the prosecution deficient, but the point is a Barthesian one (Barthes, 1981). Images without what Barthes identifies as “captions” – diagnosis (as it might be) – are less compelling as evidence than is suggested by the historical positioning of the photograph as the product of a scientific investigatory tool (i.e., a camera), a device of a piece with “the thermometer, barometer, hygrometer” (Eder, 1978: 238–239). The defense case – as with any contextual “text” – “comes to sublimate, patheticize, or rationalize the image” (Barthes, 1982: 204–205). This possibility is obvious to cinema studies (and, it must be said, to at least some lawyers as well) if not to members of LEVA and IACP. Such doubts do not divert

614

Brian Winston

Grant Fredericks and his fellows. Forensically, the evidentiary status of the realist photographic image is not commonly held to be subject to many intrinsic theoretical ambiguities. Cinema studies, though, is quick to point out that this is naive. For Nichols, it is a “positivist fallacy” (Nichols, 1994: 22) to assume a correspondence between the photographic image and the referent; for Stuart Hall it is “a naturalistic illusion” so to do (Hall, 1982: 75). As Elizabeth Cowie insists: “the recorded ‘seen and heard’ is not simply knowable or evidential, but requires interpretation that can become misinterpretation” (Cowie, 2005: 183). That the recorded image cannot simply be unambiguous is a crucial limitation on the panic that forensic video analysis potentially engenders. It is the central lesson of the Holliday Tape. Leave aside all of the defense’s well-honed legal techniques (change of trial venue, jury selection, neutral professional language to describe brutality, induced ostranenie by repeated close frame analysis of the tape), the essence of the defense was simply to present (non-video) evidence of the 22 minutes prior to the moment when Holliday switched on the camera: a high-speed car-chase with King resisting questioning and arrest. In so doing, the self-evident meaning of the tape was recontextualized as possible misinterpretation, never mind how commonsensical that reading had at first appeared. Non-video testimony as to King’s behavior during this prior period gave a context, a caption, to the subsequent video. As ever, what was beyond the frame containing “the recorded ‘seen-and-heard’” was (or could be made to seem) crucial. This is always inevitably the case because the frame is, exactly, a “frame” – it is blinkered, excluding, partial, limited. This is what the prosecution failed to grasp. Nevertheless the belief that the image, the frame, doesn’t lie continues to be central to video forensics, and it is thus no surprise to discover Grant Fredericks,4 “the world’s most celebrated expert on video forensics,” on Court TV making a positive ID of three perpetrators of a robbery and murder using nothing more sophisticated than a frame enlargement as the basis of his “expertise” (Court TV, n.d). The crime had taken place on October 18, 2002 at a convenience store in Fort Worth, Texas. Fredericks implicitly assumed the stores’ four surveillance cameras provided unmediated data and enlarged images so that he could match a tattoo on the upper-buttock of the killer (partially revealed by his low-slung jeans and underpants) with that of a suspect.5 QED. The integrity of the image – to what extent it had been (as Charles Peirce has it at one point) “physically forced to correspond point by point” to the referent – was not in question (Peirce, 1931–1966: 2.281). It cannot be in such work and Fredericks simply ignores the issue. The shooting, moreover, happens off-camera; all Fredericks has is a man with a tattooed buttock pointing a gun, of itself a far more inconclusive element than Fredericks, and Court TV, suggests. For all that received opinion suggests that cameras inevitably supply incontrovertible “silent witness,” in fact they rarely do so. This instance is, in fact, rather exceptional (as is the Holliday Tape) in that the image’s authenticity has not been queried. For one thing, the killers – scarcely master criminals – conveniently adopted no disguise or masking of any kind. Despite the low definition of the cameras, the “perps” were quickly identified by the public when the footage was played on the



Surveillance in the Service of Narrative

615

news bulletins. Yet the law requires that even a silent witness be subject to interrogation and deconstruction; exactly what happened to George Holliday’s footage of the King incident. But, as with the Fredericks example, the technique could not be more basic. Another example: Captain Robert Franks of the Memphis Police Department wrote (perhaps) finis in 2000 to a decades-long controversy over the authenticity of Robert Capa’s famous 1936 image of a loyalist Spanish soldier at the moment of death. He authenticated the photograph in 1996 by dint of detailed examination which revealed that the man’s fingers were relaxed, curled into his palm, when, had he been conscious, they would have been reflexively tensed to brace his fall. Add to this careful analysis of other factors such as further accounts of the battle, the geography of the gulley as well as the cloud formation in the image, other images on the reel, and the following was pronounced: “There can be no further doubt that The Falling Soldier is a photograph of Federico Borrell García at the moment of his death during the battle at Cerro Muriano on September 5, 1936” (Whelan, 2006). Or perhaps there is. Should we wish to maintain our cynicism, there is still nothing to guarantee that the image has not been manipulated either at the site as a staging or in the darkroom in some way. Capt Franks’s understanding of the significance of the relaxed fingers is a consequence of what Nichols has termed “embodied knowledge” (Nichols, 1994: 2). I do not share such specialized expertise and have to take Franks’s testimony as to the semiotic significance of this on trust. Or rather, to use a conceit of Umberto Eco’s, I have to take a metaphorical “inferential walk” into the above text [Frank’s statement] and image [Capa’s photograph] (Eco, 1984) testing how they correspond to my understanding of reality and I can only do so on the basis of what Peirce termed a “collateral … previous acquaintance with what the sign denotes” (Peirce, 1931–1966: 8.179).6 Without such “collateral” understanding, I will not be able make sense of the image. In this instance, I will not grasp the significance of the relaxed fingers. My testing “walk” therefore turns upon the extent to which I have an everyday trust in police officers and their expertise. It also depends on the fact that I have to hand no history of the processing of the image – where the darkroom was, where the negative is, and so on. I have to trust Capa and Life (which picked it up from the French Vu magazine which originally published it in September of 1936). These days, there is very little reason to do that anymore (if there ever was). Processing has always undercut the received understanding of Peircean “indexicality” (in the sense of images being “forced” into a “point to point correspondence” with the referent). The King affair took place just a few years after the introduction of the first home computer image manipulation program, Photoshop, became available. The first professional program, Scitex, is nearly a decade older than that.7 These might well remain beyond common usage – just as darkroom manipulations were never part of the amateur analog photographer’s usual technical expertise; but the ubiquity of CGI suggests that there is an inevitable dynamic here, finally (albeit slowly) undercutting the scienticism of the camera. There is ever less reason to believe that the camera “cannot lie.”

616

Brian Winston

The initial acquittal of the four Los Angeles police who beat up King gave a powerful warning that even when accepted as unmediated (as was the Holliday Tape) photographic evidence was not conclusive. Nevertheless, prosecutorial authorities appear to remain in the grip the “illusionist fallacy” which holds that it must be. The naivety bacillus has proved itself to be something of a superbug. Consider the Broward County, Florida DAs, for example. More than a decade after the King affair, in 2003, these lawyers had no hesitancy in mounting a case of abuse solely based on video evidence taken on a “nanny-cam” intermittent recording system. The images showed a woman violently shaking a baby. Not even the fact that the baby exhibited no sign of having been mistreated caused the authorities to be diverted by doubt. They incarcerated the nanny – Claudia Muro, a Peruvian immigrant – pending trial. As in the King affair, for the DAs the video existed as a “silent witness” which could not be rebutted. It nevertheless took them some 29 months to come to court but then, instantly, their belief was shattered by “expert” technical opinion which pointed out the images were, as engineers have it, “artifacts” of the cut-price recording system which had captured them. The recording was faulty, the judder internal to the device. The footage did not contain images of an abused infant: Muro had not shaken the child (or, if she had done so, that had been off-camera leaving no mark on the baby). The video was useless as evidence of abuse. Nothing perhaps better illustrates the grip of the illusionist fallacy than that the baby’s parents were reported as nevertheless still feeling that releasing the nanny was a miscarriage of justice as they believed in the images “110%” (AP, 2003). Jean Baudrillard could well add this to the Gulf War as a locus classicus of the supposition that the modern world is dominated by simulacra. The technology can lie – and even when it does not (that is, even when the image is unmanipulated beyond the limitations of the equipment and processes of production), it requires the viewers’ “embodied knowledge” if it is to be deconstructed. Little wonder then that the possibility of “misinterpretation” is ever present, even with automated surveillance imagery. The mechanism whereby text “amplifies” image (or otherwise links reference to referent) is, of course, a central issue in semiotics, but here I wish to assume the connectivity for the purposes of examining the implications of surveillance for the documentary film without determining its exact nature. Suffice to say that this is no mere taxonomic issue. In fact, the received understanding of Peirce’s notion of photographic “indexicality” (i.e., images are “forced” into a “point to point correspondence”) can be disputed.8 Not only is this self-evidently not the case (and never has been), the Peircean Goran Sonesson adds: “The trouble with a purely indexicalist account of photography is that it cannot explain what the photograph is a picture of ” (Sonesson, 1999: 28). Thus, even if we lay aside potential “artifacts” within the image-recording processes, the photograph’s witness still presents more symptom than diagnosis. All parties agreed that the police had beaten King and that the bystander George Holliday, surveying the scene with his Sony CCD-F77 camcorder, had recorded the event with no question of manipulation or mediation beyond the inevitable idiosyncrasy of his operation and the limitation of the camera



Surveillance in the Service of Narrative

617

itself. Nevertheless what Annette Hill has called the image’s referential integrity (significantly a term taken from data mining) (Hill, 2007: 139) did not grant the Holliday Tape immunity from various conflicting interpretations. What is within the frame itself is never self-evident.

First Impressions Can Be Misleading Consider ethnographic filmmaking: it implicitly relies on the referential integrity of the footage as the basis of its claim on scientific validity. That cinematography, despite its iconic richness, has never become an indispensable tool of anthropological fieldwork affords as good a proof as any of the limited evidentiary potential of the image as scientific data. Whatever techniques are deployed, referential integrity cannot be guaranteed by the screen alone and this, never mind other scholarly snobberies, has marginalized the camera as an investigative tool for all the social sciences. From the outset of anthropological filmmaking – conventionally, Arthur Haddon’s footage of Torres Strait islanders dancing and making fire shot in 1898 – scientific intention was compromised. The moving image camera was employed by Haddon as a scientific instrument, gathering visual data for later analysis. … Yet even in this first use of the moving image camera in the field for the purposes of academic ethnography, its limitations as a scientific data-collecting device become apparent. For not only had all the dances and the fire-making been performed expressly for the camera, thereby compromising the objectivity of the visual data gathered, but the most significant dance filmed by Haddon had involved a considerable degree of artifice. (Henley, 2013)

This could not be solved by ethnographic filmmakers not “cheating” (to use Ricky Leacock’s term describing the underlying rational for Direct Cinema protocols). That is: simply improving observational techniques and avoiding reconstruction will not produce scientific “silent witness” evidence for ethnographic filmmakers any more than it produced “objectivity” for, say, a Direct Cinema practitioner such as Wiseman when he adopted this non-intervention dogme (to borrow von Trier’s term for binding production protocols) for his documentaries. This was despite the fact that the ethnographers could deploy onscreen presentational modes denied to such observational documentarists who were imprisoned by the demands of narrative and protocols of fly-on-the-wall transparency. The Ax Fight (1975) presents anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and ethnographic filmmaker Timothy Asch’s filmed witness of a dispute in the Yanomami village of Mishimishiböwie-Teri in Venezuela (1.35 N by 65.20 W) that occurred, they tell us, on February 28, 1971. Starting at around 15:10, Asch shot a full 400 ft 16 mm reel (11+ minutes) to record the altercation. His 12 shots, covering about one-third of the duration of the incident, were taken from two positions on an

618

Brian Winston

Arriflex BL loaded with a Kodak Ektachrome reversal 7255 stock. The shots are seen three times in The Ax Fight – unedited, “raw,” as they emerged from the lab; edited, with slow- and stop-motion and superimposed arrows to explain who was involved in the fight and what their kinship ties were; and, finally, edited as a narrative, with cross-cuts. The footage is also interspersed with maps and kinship diagrams. The sound track variously uses direct synch location recording and sound-only conversations among the ethnographers (taken after the film ran out) as well as voice-over commentary. The stills, the superimpositions, and the commentary function in the same way as the defense lawyer’s presentation of context for the Holliday Tape. Indeed, Asch suggests that full understanding of the incident – in an anthropology classroom, say – requires exactly that the film be viewed repeatedly, just as the defense made the jury do with the Holliday Tape. Even without multiple viewings, though, the repeated use of the footage in the 30-minute film and the contextual elements provided suggest how the images must be interpreted. In a situation where the viewer can be expected to have no detailed “embodied knowledge” of the Yanomami, the referential integrity of the material cannot be easily questioned. Metaphorical “inferential walks” will not easily establish authenticity. With The Ax Fight, many of us, lacking direct experience of Venezuelan minority ethnic groups, will have little “collateral” prior understanding. We can only take “inferential walks” against our intertextual understandings; that is, what we know comes not from experience directly but from other texts. To that extent we are in Chagnon and Asch’s hands. As with the Holliday Tape, such questions as arise are not – at first sight – primarily grounded in worries about mediation. Although, unlike Holliday, Chagnon, Asch, and their colleagues were clearly a presence, there is still no obvious reason to assume they directly intervened in the incident. The initial shots are all taken at the long end of the zoom lens with the Westerners on the far side of the village’s central clearing at some distance from the fight. Although the camera repositions more closely, Asch is still in more surveillance than directing mode. There are cuts in his footage but each individual shot appears to be unmediated. There are also certain other inconsistencies which can be read off (Winston, 2008: 176–179) but, again, these are minor and, on a balance of probabilities, do not of themselves destroy the integrity of the footage. The viewer, at least on such a balance, has no self-evident reason to assume that Chagnon and Asch have done anything other than present unmediated silent witness evidence. Nevertheless, leaving all such considerations aside, despite their various elaborate attempts to close off questions as to the meaning of the events (e.g., graphics, superimpositions, commentary, etc.), doubts can be raised. The cause of the dispute remains clearly at issue. The film itself, self-deprecatingly, highlights this by proposing a reason for the fight in voice-over. But a caption immediately contradicts that explanation: “First impressions can be misleading,” it states. We have enough “embodied knowledge” to read this as a rare and welcome indication of truth telling. But this is seductive in that, because we can appreciate the



Surveillance in the Service of Narrative

619

contradiction in this way, we are being positioned – as by an effective legal counsel – to trust the film on other matters where our embodied knowledge must be more limited. The naked Yanomami are, and the anthropologists trade on this, an “other.” Yet they are not so “other” that their behavior entirely – or even remotely – defies common understanding. It is not so alien that only an anthropologist can explain it. Despite the fact that, in making judgments about the film, our inferential walks are restricted, largely bounded by one’s intertextual knowledge of (to use an ideologically charged term) “unacculturated” First Peoples, we might nevertheless draw conclusions different from those being suggested by Chagnon. The seductions of the initial truth-telling framing need to be resisted. For example, the overall context of the event is that the Yanomami are, as Chagnon called them in his popular account of the tribes, “a fierce people” (Chagnon, 1968); he sees this as the result of a genetic disposition. Commonsense, however, suggests that this incident can be read in quite a different way as showing a commendable respect for law and order. The machetes involved in the fight are used blunt-side forward and peace is restored by a leader who achieves it instantly by simply presenting himself to the combatants. Further investigation (aka “inferential walks”) outside of the film reveals that Chagnon’s characterization of the Yanomami as inherently (genetically) violent is by no means uniformly accepted by his peers. John Collier, for example, disputes his view and sees Yanomami society as being no more prone to violence than any other. He found them to be a gentle and warm people (Collier, 1988: 84–85). Another anthropologist, R. Brian Ferguson, suggested (1992) that far from being genetically predisposed to fighting, elevated levels of violent behavior occurred among the Yanomami only because of the incursions of Western anthropologists. The people, as the largest “unacculturated” group known to the West, have undergone more Western anthropological investigation than any other. And anthropology, it should not be forgotten, does not exactly have mani pulite – clean hands. As Jean Rouch once observed, the discipline is “the eldest daughter of colonialism” (Eaton, 1979: 26). Ferguson disputes that genes can be isolated as the cause of Yanomami violence, as Chagnon argued. Better to attribute it to the tribes fighting over the goods introduced into their environment by Western anthropologists. Indeed, on the apparent basis of Ferguson’s opinion given in interview for a BBC documentary of 2007, filmmaker Adam Curtis suggests the very machetes seen in the filmed ax fight were originally provided by Chagnon himself.9 Despite the deployment of all those techniques to suggest referential integrity, one realizes that there is at some point an unfilmed prior handover of the axes missing from The Ax Fight. Suddenly, as with the missing 22-minute car-chase which happened before the Holliday Tape began, the entire meaning of the images is recast. King was beaten by Powell as surely as the Yanomami Mohesiwä was attacked by an ax-wielding Këbowä; but such “indexicality” explains little. Ferguson and Curtis, playing the police defense lawyer’s role in the King affair, explain more. Chagnon, of course, denies the charges both specifically and more generally. He walked out of his 2007 interview with Curtis outraged

620

Brian Winston

when asked if he thought his presence in the village – he had arrived two days before the fight – affected behaviour.10 We cannot know … everything: and that is the point … always.

Research Footage → Record Footage → Documentary David MacDougall draws a distinction between different ethnographic filming objectives to which the triple exposure of the Chagnon/Asch material in The Ax Fight speaks. “Research Footage” involves surveillance – un- (or minimally) mediated observation – to furnish fragments of filmed human behavior which can be “made to serve specific scientific enquiries” often requiring “painstaking frame-byframe analysis” to yield knowledge of, for example, culturally determined interpersonal kinesics (MacDougall, 1998: 180). “Record Footage” is made “for more broadly descriptive purposes” and can be traced back to Haddon’s Torres Straight footage, and is “a medium for general ethnographic documentation.” Such footage, though, can be distinguished, in MacDougall’s analysis, from “films” (i.e., documentaries; MacDougall, 1998: 181, 182). Indeed, neither research nor record footage can easily or automatically (as it were) become “films” because making documentaries requires that filming – including the production phase itself – be subjected to “processes of selection and interpretation.” Such (shall we call it?) “directing” – even if only internalized at the moment of shooting by the cinematographer – becomes, in MacDougall’s view, “increasingly necessary during filming in order to represent complex events.” One needs, from the outset at the moment of shooting, to be providing “diagnosis” – whereas surveillance (i.e., research or record footage) eschews such provision. So, as Grierson initially formulated, MacDougall confirms that, in effect documentaries require the “creative treatment” of such material (aka: actuality). Surveillance, although not a sufficient condition, remains a necessary one for the realist documentary. This brings in its train an essential ethical dilemma. The nonintervention implied by surveillance logically suggests that the basis of ethical collaboration between filmmaker and subject – that which is the essence of informed consent – cannot be achieved. Of course, in practice, this dilemma ought to be met by ethical arrangements for collaboration being made subsequent to the filming. The worm in the ethical bud, however, still lies here because surveillance itself is not ethically pulite. And that has tainted documentary ethics at least from the moment Lionel Rogosin hid his camera from the destitute he filmed for On the Bowery in 1956. The Bridge (Eric Steel, US, 2007) demonstrates, at its most dramatic, the ethical difficulties that arise from following Rogosin. The film focuses on the Golden Gate Bridge, claimed as the world’s most popular site for suicides. Throughout 2004, Steel and his crews surreptitiously filmed, on very long lenses, suicides and attempted suicides as people clambered over the four-foot barrier to hurl themselves for four seconds at 75 miles a hour into the waters of San Francisco Bay, some 220 feet below.



Surveillance in the Service of Narrative

621

Although these instances of “record footage” are augmented by pictorialist images of the bridge,11 interviews with the families of the victims (and one survivor) as well as witnesses, the surveillance footage is the central focus of the film. It is The Bridge’s visual raison d’être; the heart of its dramatic tension; the prime source of its voyeuristic, scopophilic attraction. It is hard not to assume Steel (and his backers) fully understand this. Consider how the footage of people jumping to their death is used. Every shot of a solitary person wandering across the bridge is edited so as to be charged as an image of someone who might commit suicide at any moment. Of these solo figures, three are actually shown jumping; and, of them, one is seen hitting the water. (In the other instances, the film cuts away.) This jump, with camera panning all the way down until the body hits and disappears, is, of course, the film’s climactic image. It signals closure. Centuries ago the Ars moriendi, a handbook to the art of dying, could be a best-seller for decades so mainstreamed was death; but, conversely, representations of sexual congress were forbidden. Currently, though, death is pornographic while sexual imagery is mainstreamed. Given that representations of death are now transgressive, the death of the person hitting the water in The Bridge is, it cannot be denied, Eric Steel’s “money shot.” The crew amassed nearly 10,000 hours of material, not so much documentary rushes as a forensic dataset of images. When filming began in 2004, there had been, since the bridge’s opening in 1937, about 1200 suicides. Not all bodies are recovered and it is probable that some manage to jump at dusk without being spotted. One recorded suicide occurs on average around once a fortnight and, historically, the annual death rate is in the low 20s. Twenty-three of the 24 “jumpers” of 2004 were filmed crossing the barrier and flinging themselves off. The film’s 90 minutes highlight 10 cases. (This includes a survivor – one of only 29 in the bridge’s history – who actually jumped in 2000.) There are two other anonymous jumpers (who maybe among the 10 2004 cases about whom we hear from relatives, friends, and witnesses but are not clearly identified). There is also a young woman whom Steel filmed being saved by a passing photographer and is seen being led off handcuffed by the police. She is not interviewed but the photographer is, as are other interviewed witnesses. Cross-cutting their testimony with footage of the incidents they describe provides an earnest of authenticity for the surveillance material in general. As with the Holliday Tape, there is no question of image manipulation. These “jumpers” jumped. Steel and his crew were most effective surveillants and the film is not obviously conditioned by any limitations of their coverage. When seeking permission to direct this, his debut documentary, feature producer Eric Steel12 was, in a fashion far from unknown to more experienced practitioners, not entirely candid with the authorities about his intentions. The film, he told the Golden Gate National Recreation Area managers, “is meant to capture the powerful, spectacular intersection of monument and nature that takes place every day at the Golden Gate Bridge” (Feinstein, 2006). He did not mention suicide. He was also reportedly somewhat economical with the truth when explaining the film to the family and friends he wished to interview. He did not tell

622

Brian Winston

them that he intended to show their loved ones jumping to their deaths. His justification was not that they might refuse to cooperate but that: “I didn’t want the word to get out and possibly encourage people to kill themselves who saw a chance to be in the film” (Feinstein, 2006). It is the case that allowing post-traumatic victims (such as those being interviewed) to testify on camera is a proven therapy for distress; but Steel’s inability to avoid subterfuge, for all that it is widely accepted as legitimate professional behavior, undercuts the psychological good he might have been doing.13 He also interviews a mother and child who witnessed a jump with the morally curious result of having a remarkably articulate little boy cheerfully remembering on camera the day he saw a young woman kill herself.14 And he manages, in more than one situation, to expose the inadequacies and guilt of the suicides’ circle of family and friends. As to Steel’s responsibility to his crew and the possibility that they too might be traumatized by the task he set them, I say nothing, except to note its possibility (Winston, 1995). The Bridge was “inspired” by a New Yorker article – “Jumpers” (Friend, 2003) – which receives a screen-credit as such. However, Tad Friend’s article is more a scenario for another film altogether than a source for Steel’s movie. Friend’s account stands as something of a moral reproach to The Bridge’s many ethical failings. Instead of decontexualized emotional tales of grief and mental disturbance, the story in the New Yorker is one of public disdain and political misfeasance which for more than six decades had scandalously ignored the suicides and has refused to erect preventative barriers. Friend, in essence, provides a thoughtful descant on the value of life under late capitalism. He too deals with the jumpers but the framing incident of his article is the case of a man who threw himself off in protest against the Gulf War (and survived). For his survivor, Steel ignored this person and turned instead to the second of Friend’s survivor cases: the young man (who jumped in 2000) with his tale of oedipal oppression and tension. Friend in general provides socio-political context beyond the individual mental health travails that Steel spotlights. His story is about the controversy over a safety barrier and the suicide cases highlight the need for it. Steel’s film is about watching mentally ill people die and hearing from their close ones how their deaths could not be explained. Broader issues, even questions of mental health itself, are eschewed. It is no surprise that Steel, unlike Friend, seeks no mental health professional opinion to enlighten himself, his interviewees, or us, his audience, about suicide. Nor does Steel, except tangentially with the incident where a woman is persuaded not to jump, deal with the 50–80 people a year who are similarly saved. For Friend, a key player in the Golden Gate story is Officer Kevin Briggs, recipient of the 2002 Highway Patrol’s Uniformed Employee of the Year award. Briggs had talked more than 200 people out of jumping over the years and believes he does a better job than a safety barrier could. In fact, although 98% of those who do jump die, twice as many or more – up to 80 a year – are persuaded to abandon the attempt. The story for the New Yorker remains: why is there no barrier? Friend reports that 50% of San Franciscans had polled their opposition to building one. A



Surveillance in the Service of Narrative

623

campaigner on the bridge who called for preventative action was abused by the public and eventually driven off. Workers in a nearby lumber-yard ran a book on what day jumps would occur. A radio DJ promised a case of apple juice to the family of a victim. This hostility to solving the problem is matched by officialdom. No serious consideration was given to erecting a barrier. A proposal for a wire grid was dismissed as smacking of a concentration camp and would mar the bridge’s beauty. But, despite such underlying appeals to aesthetics, an eight-foot tall cyclone “debris fence” has been erected to protect the Fort Point National Park which is directly underneath the bridge’s southern anchorage and $5 million has also been found to erect a 4 ft 6in steel barrier to separate the bicycle lane from vehicular traffic. There has never been an accident involving an automobile and a bike but this was considered, Friend reports, “a public safety issue.” A $20 million barrier to prevent head-on car crashes has also been considered: another “public safety issue” but not one grounded in actual incidents. People killing themselves every other week, however, is, apparently, not a “public safety issue.” By way of explanation, a Democratic local politician told Friend: “There’s a lot of white republicans on the [city] Board [of Supervisors] who resist change.” Anyway, from Eric Steel and his backers’ point of view, a “public safety issue” will not fund a film crew’s surveillance work for a year. Watching people die will.

Surveillance in the Service of Narrative Tad Friend’s piece is thus defensible in classic public right-to-know terms whereas, on its face, Steel’s film does nothing to justify itself ethically. Still, the New Yorker is itself not above reproach because reporting suicides never can be – even here under the guise of academic documentary film studies. This is because suicide is the clearest – in my view, the only– subject where direct media impact can be demonstrated. The problem is not, then, a question of morality per se but of harm. The stark fact is that in the years following the release of The Bridge the suicide rate jumped 50% or so from an average (2000–2005) of 21 a year (which is in line with the historic statistic of around one death a fortnight) to 30.4 a year. In 2006 and 2007, the years of The Bridge’s maximum exposure, 36 people (2006) and 39 people (2007) died (James, 2011). One suicide prevention activist believes this spike was caused by the authorities being forced by the film to reveal a truer figure of mortalities than they usually did; but other research suggests that praying in a conspiracy is less convincing than accepting the film’s impact.15 Steel’s defenders are anyway happy to suggest the film has caused a rethink on the barrier issue. A $2 m barrier viability study was completed in 2010 and a $5 m federal grant was secured, thanks it is claimed to the film. However the spike in deaths is not so attributed. (And the money, thus far, is but a tenth of current estimates of what is needed.) Amid a number of studies of imitative suicide outbreaks, the most compelling evidence of direct media impact comes from Vienna. After the city’s subway was

624

Brian Winston

opened in 1978, it became a favored suicide site. A suicide prevention group began campaigning, in the media, for media restraint. The press and broadcasters agreed and in 1987, “splashes” and images of the dead ceased to be used. Cases were increasingly left completely unreported. The suicide rate was slashed by 84.2% (Etzersdorfer and Sonneck, 1998). Of course, causality is a very difficult thing to demonstrate: the Golden Gate rate, having slowly been falling back in the later years of the twenty-first century’s first decade , returned last year to 33 (Payne, 2013) . Obviously multiple factors (e.g., economic conditions) play a role as much as does any media message. But, equally, there is clearly evidence here that media does have an impact; so much so that the phenomenon of copycat events following the reporting of suicide has been identified in the medical literature as “The Werther Effect.”16 This is in contrast with the usual moral panic claims of imitative social deviancy (including violent behaviors) being caused by the media. Indeed, in these instances, establishing in any one case such an effect (e.g., the serial killer’s liking for De Sade causing him to kill) is to demonstrate the psychopathy (or sociopathy) of the individual so acting, not any general effect. Any connection is a symptom not a cause. With suicide, though, the evidence suggests that, uniquely, there is direct impact. So much so that it might well afford an argument, rare if not unique in a democracy with a right of free expression, for a bilderverbot – a prohibition of image making.17 Friend reported that the Marin County coroner told him that he had begged the local papers at least to stop giving the cumulative number of deaths when it got to around 850. They had made a fuss about the 500th in 1973 and the local media had been weaned, at least to a certain extent, by this appeal. But this point was obviously not taken on board by Steel. Instead he gives us 90 minutes of tips about how to commit a Golden Gate Bridge suicide – state of mind, preparations, ways to cross the barrier, what it feels like to fall, and so on. All of this, however, is without context. We share the families’ and witnesses’ bewilderment at why these events happened. Surveillance explains nothing. The first isolated figure we see in The Bridge is that of a man with a mane of long black hair, and he is Gene, whom we see die in a final shot at the film’s end. He was 35-year-old Gene Sprague18 and he is in 15 other shots spaced out through the film’s 90 minutes. The repeated return to Gene’s wandering the bridge sets up a classic hermeneutic: is he a “jumper”? Will he jump? He does. The end. In reality, Sprague was observed by the filmmakers for 90 minutes on May 11, 2004; the chronotime of the film matches the chronology of his last minutes on earth. The Sprague element in The Bridge is, thus, a perfect (if perhaps overly dramatic) example of the consanguinity of surveillance and documentary. Documentary depends on witness (here provided by the surveillance research footage and the record footage of the interviews) and narrative (here produced by the hermeneutics of the editing process which so positions the image of Sprague preparing to die). These 17 shots are what the film is actually about. They dictate the whole 90-minute arc of the movie.



Surveillance in the Service of Narrative

625

The moral question thus returns: for 90 minutes the filmmakers observed Gene Sprague and they did nothing. This is extreme. It is beyond being justified, in my view, by any claims of public interest and free expression even if these were far, far more pressingly made than they are in this case. But leave that aside: Steel’s morally reprehensible inaction (made, by the way, all the worse because Sprague’s long awaited job came through after he left the house that morning) speaks to a more widespread difficulty – the original sin of the professional observer. As the press critic A.J. Liebling once put it: it is very difficult for the cub reporter to understand that his [or her] great story is somebody else’s disastrous fire. In this case, it would appear that it is the Hollywood producer’s inability to realize that his great shot is somebody killing her or his self that is before us. And in less extreme circumstances, the problem still remains. Surveillance is one crucial basis for documentary’s claim on the real but its use is Faustian. Au fond, we live under the camera’s eye but we can’t complain too much about it. The logic of how we come to this level of general intrusion in our lives, which is symbolized (if you will) by the dominance of the observational (the surveillance element) in the documentary, is clear: we want freedom to document, we want the right to know. Surveillance seamlessly meshes with such demands. But, somehow, the doings of an Eric Steel are more disturbing than those of a Grant Fredericks.

Afterword on The Bridge In June of 2014, a plan to erect, at a cost of $50m, a safety barrier for the Golden Gate Bridge was at last approved. The filmmakers have claimed at the outset that they were raising awareness but causality, the empiric research suggests, is more clearly seen in the hike in suicide numbers following the film’s release than in its more ­putative impact on public opinion. This last might well have some substance, albeit at a decade’s distance, but the increased deaths still suggest that surveillance raises deep moral issues for the documentary.

Notes 1 Thomas C. Christenberry, PhD is currently Director of Strategic Operations and Assistant Professor of Adult Learning, the Institute for Leadership and Professional Development, School for Adult Learning at the University of Indianapolis. 2 A terabyte is approximately 1,000 gigabytes, while a petabye is approximately 1,000 terabytes. 3 Powell et al. v. Superior Ct of LA County, 232 Cal App 3d 785 (1991); Briseño v. Superior Ct of LA County, 233 Cal App 3d 607 (1991). The jury, though, was hung on the guilt of Powell, the officer most enthusiastically using a club on King. Subsequently in the federal courts, he and the superior officer present, Sgt Koon, were both convicted of assault (Koon and Powell v. United States 94-1664 518 U.S. 81 (1996)).

626

Brian Winston

4 “Grant Fredericks is a former police officer with the Vancouver Police Department in Canada and head of the agency’s Forensic Video Unit. He is an instructor of Forensic Video Analysis at the FBI National Academy. He testifies as an expert in Forensic Video Analysis in courts throughout North America. Grant’s company, Forensic Video Solutions, provides video analysis services for police agencies in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom.” See the website www.forensicvideoexpert.com. 5 Court TV at 3:32. 6 I am deeply indebted overall to Hing Tsang for my understanding of Peirce (see Hing Tsang, 2008). 7 Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was released for the Apple Macintosh in 1990. The first Scitex scandal dates from 1982 when National Geographic was caught moving the pyramids digitally closer together for its cover. 8 See, for example, Nichols in his essay on the King affair (1994). He ascribes (via Wollen, 1988) a semiotic triad to Peirce in the following terms: “Iconic signs resemble their source [drawing for example]; indexical signs bear a “point to point correspondence with the source” [X-rays, photographs, fingerprints, for example]; and symbols bear an arbitrary relation [words, Morse code, national flags]” (Nichols, 1994: 18). However, Peirce’s view was more nuanced, and indeed, more confused than this suggests and embraces the iconicity of the photographic and the possibility of its manipulations. Arguably Peirce’s central reference of photographic indexicality (within his overall idiosyncratic and inconsistent use of the term “index”) is anomalous (Winston and Hing Tsang, 2009). 9 The Trap: “The Lonely Robot” (Adam Curtis, dir.), BBC Two, March 18, 2007. Ferguson, who does not mentioned Chagnon’s name but dismisses his genetic theory, is interviewed at 53:38. Curtis’s accusation against Chagnon is made at 54:28 in the name of “anthropologists.” Allow me a small inferential walk using my own embodied knowledge of mainstream documentary film practice here: I surmise Ferguson did not make the charge specifically on camera but gave Curtis enough information to enable him in feeling justified in making it in commentary. Hence the formulation heard in the film. 10 At 55:39. 11 As pictorialist: that is, as with the images in De Brug / The Bridge made by Joris Ivens in 1928. 12 Eric Steel is essentially a “suit” – one of the 12 producers of Angela’s Ashes and of the seven on the dated blaxploitation revived franchise Shaft (2000). He also was involved with the curious Julie and Julia about celebrity chef Julia Childs. A graduate of a shortcourse cookery school in Paris designed for expat Americans, Child was an American “embassy wife.” John Hess, for nine years the New York Times Paris correspondent, and his wife Karen, a pioneering scholar of American food history, wrote the final word on Child long ago: “She is not a cook but she plays one on TV. That’s how a friend described her when visiting us in Paris in the late 1960s. He described a comical new star all whoops and elbows who called herself ‘the French Chef ’ and purported to teach haute cuisine to the hoi poloi [sic] in quick easy lessons” (Hess and Hess, 2000:, 355). Steel appears to be attracted to fictionalized fact-based projects. 13 At its most dramatic, the therapeutic value of witnessing is an underlying theme of the literature of the Holocaust. The need to give testimony became a driver of survival itself. “Not to live and to tell,” as Primo Levy put it, “but to live to tell” (Levi, 1961: 13). 14 At 18:54. 15 My informant was Eve Meyer, executive director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention but, also, a parti pris figure as an advisor to Steel. On January 3, 2012 at 20:34, she wrote



Surveillance in the Service of Narrative

627

me (from [email protected]): “I am writing to you in my capacity…. as someone who has been a 20-year crusader for a physical suicide deterrent on the Golden Gate Bridge. I am also listed in the credits of the movie, ‘The Bridge’ as a consultant and I know the producer, Eric Steel. The reported increase in suicides in 2006 may have been an actual response to the movie or it may have been – as I suspect – an actual number that was revealed by the movie and could no longer be minimized by authorities. Since the movie was released the number of jumps from the bridge has been revealed to be much higher than the number of bodies retrieved by the Coast Guard, by a factor of as much as 30%. But as far as press coverage goes, the QUALITY, CONTENT AND FREQUENCY of the coverage matter more than the fact of the coverage in producing a cluster or spike in frequency of suicide.” 16 In Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774) the eponymous Werther, in love with an unattainable married woman, shoots himself. “The Werther Effect” was coined to describe the contagious nature of suicide by David Phillips (1974). It is, though, probable that reports of suicides following the original publication of the book are anecdotal. 17 It could be, though, that copy-cat jihadi atrocities might constitute another example of direct causation by media coverage. Incidents are thus far too few to determine this. 18 His surname is given in the roller caption of the 2004 “jumpers” at the end of The Bridge. In the body of the film he is only identified by his Christian name. An internet memorial to him can be found at http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=sprag ue&GSfn=gene&GSbyrel=all&GSdyrel=all&GSob=n&GRid=26753163&df=all&, accessed August 12, 2014.

References AP (2006) Jerky Video “Nanny Cam” Sinks Abuse Case. St Petersburg Times, March 7, http:// news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=20060307&id=AMANAAAAIBAJ&sjid=2n IDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4928,869259, accessed August 10, 2014. Barthes, Roland (1981) Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang. Chagnon, Napoleon (1968) Yanamomö: The Fierce People. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston. Collier, John, Jr. (1988) The Future of Ethnographic Film. In Rollwagen, Jack (ed.) Anthropological Filmmaking. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers. Court TV (n.d.) Media Room. Forensic Video Solutions, http://www.forensicvideoexpert.com/ index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=118&Itemid=27, accessed August 10, 2014. Cowie, Elizabeth (2005) Seeing and Hearing for Ourselves: The Spectacle of Reality in the Holocaust Documentary. In Haggith, Toby and Newman, Joanna (eds.) Holocaust and the  Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television Since 1933. London: Wallflower Press. Eaton, Mike (ed.) (1979) Anthropology – Reality – Cinema. London: BFI. Eco, Umberto (1984) The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts [1979]. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eder, Joseph Maria (1978) History of Photography, trans. E. Epstean. New York: Dover. Etzersdorfer, Elmar and Sonneck, Gernot (1998) Preventing Suicide by Mass Media Report: The Viennese Experience 1980–1986. Archives of Suicide Research, 4, 67–74. Feinstein, Howard (2006) Get Your Suicide Here, Folks. The Guardian, June 23.

628

Brian Winston

Ferguson, R. Brian (1992) A Savage Encounter: Western Contact and the Yanamomi War Complex. In Ferguson (ed.) War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Fredericks, Grant (2010) The Question You Need to Answer: Can Video Evidence Be Trusted? Evidence Technology Magazine, 8(3), 10–14. Friend, Tad (2003) Jumpers: The Fatal Grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge. The New Yorker, October 13. Garrison, Dale (2007) New LEVA Laboratory is a Giant Step Forward for Video Analysis Training. Evidence Technology Magazine, 5(2), 22–25. Garrison, Dale (2012) The 2011 Hockey Riots in Vancouver Proved the Value of the Latest Innovations in Forensic Video Technology. Evidence Technology Magazine, 10(1). Hall, Stuart (1982) The Rediscovery of “Ideology”: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies. In Gurevitch, Michael et al. (eds.) Culture, Society and the Media. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Henley, Paul (2013) Anthropology – The Evolution of Ethnographic Film. In Winston, Brian (ed.) The Documentary Film Book. London: BFI/Palgrave. Hess, John and Hess, Karen (2000) The Taste of America. Champagne: University of Illinois Press. Hill, Annette (2007) Restyling Factual TV: Audiences and News, Documentary and Reality Genres. London: Routledge. Hing Tsang (2008) Peirce’s Living Sign and the Cinema of Jon Jost, Van der Keuken and Rithy Panh. PhD awarded June 19, 2008. University of Lincoln, UK. James, Scott (2011) Approaching a Record Year for Suicides on Bridge and Tracks. The Bay Citizen, August 25. Levi, Primo (1961) Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: Macmillan. MacDougall, David (1998) Transcultural Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McVeigh, Tracy (2013) “Stop Rise of the Killer Robots,” Campaigners Tell World Leaders. The Observer, February 24. Nichols, Bill (1994) Blurred Boundaries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Payne, Paul (2013) 33 Killed in Golden Gate Bridge Suicides in 2012. The Press Democrat, January 10. Peirce, Charles S. (1931–1966) The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, ed. C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A.W. Burks. 8 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Phillips, David (1974) The Influence of Suggestion on Suicides: Substantial and Theoretical Applications of the Werther Effect. American Sociological Review, 39, 340–354. Sonesson, Göran (1999) Post-photography and Beyond. Visio, 4(1), 11–36. Whelan, Richard (2006) Proving That Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier Is Genuine: A Detective Story. PBS America, May 28. Winston, Brian (1995) No Wimps in Wenatchee: Journalists & Trauma. British Journalism Review, 6(4), 32–35. Winston, Brian (2008) Claiming the Real II. Documentary: Grierson & Beyond. London: BFI. Winston, Brian (2012) A Right to Offend. London: Bloomsbury. Winston, Brian and Hing Tsang (2009) The Subject and the Indexicality of the Photograph. Semiotica, 173(1–4), 453–469. Wollen, Peter (1988) Signs and Meaning in the Cinema [1969]. London: BFI.

29

Face Blind

Documentary Media and Subversion of Surveillance Patrik Sjöberg

Introduction One of the key concerns in the development of most, if not all recording technologies since the early 1800s and onward has been clarity and intelligibility. In the development of cameras, first the still photography camera, and later the film camera, this was seen in the attention paid to correct exposure, on the one hand, and the depicted subject being in proper focus on the other. Similarly, in the development of sound recording technologies since the invention of the phonograph, the focus has been on the clarity of recording and its amplification. The conventions that developed around these technologies – the depicted subjects being in focus and given enough light to be identified according to an understanding of what proper exposure of film amounts to – reinforced these concerns to reproduce sound and image in a manner that was guided by immediacy and clarity. In contrast, many of the works and conceptual approaches that will be discussed in this essay are about technologies pulling in the opposite direction: towards obscurity, in a withdrawal from conventional visibility, and a refusal to be represented in terms of clarity and intelligible information. Here instead, the aim is not to be able to identify the depicted person, event or place, but rather the opposite, to hide or disguise the depicted so as to render him or her unidentifiable in a conventional sense. What we now see is an attempt to achieve complete or at least partial anonymity within a generous and inclusive understanding of the framework of audiovisual culture. The central concern of this chapter is what it now means to be the object of someone’s act of looking, with or without proper consent. The field of surveillance studies as it has developed in the humanities is too large and diverse to be summarized in A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

630

Patrik Sjöberg

any easy way, and I will not attempt to do so here. I would, however, like to mention what I perceive to be an important shift in recent surveillance studies that has influenced my discussion of acts of resistance to surveillance. This shift, as I understand it, is a distinct move away from the two canonical models for surveillance activities and the discourses that surround and attempt to understand them: the Panopticonmodel and the Big Brother-model. Jeremy Bentham’s prison model and Michel Foucault’s elaboration, and George Orwell’s model of the evil all-knowing all-seeing state, have proven fruitful and important for understanding a range of tendencies and patterns that arise as a result of surveillance cultures, whether they be social, psychological, political, judicial, technological, or aesthetic. As the surveillance landscape shifts and moves, however, the model founded upon a dichotomy of the watcher, on the one hand, and the person being watched, on the other, however diverse and dynamic, can no longer house the new actors, technologies, and behaviors on the ground and within the field. The proliferation of cameras in our everyday lives, within both the professional and private spheres, the ability to store and distribute these recordings, together with the vast field of new commercial actors monitoring our consumer patterns and hobbies for self-serving purposes, all contribute to this expansion of the models used to understand surveillance cultures. This is perhaps nowhere clearer than when we approach the relatively narrow area of surveillance studies dedicated to the subversion of or resistance to surveillance. This chapter attends to a specific locus of surveillance culture and its resistance: technologies that focus upon the centrality of the face for surveillance and subsequently, the practices that have developed for subversion of such face tracking technologies.1 David Lyon (2009), in his study of the ID card – addressing its history and materiality, together with the problems raised when modern society’s need for identification merges with surveillance strategies – gives several examples of identification technologies that have been rejected in the United States, Japan, and France. This rejection is based on a fear that the information recorded by the identification technology can be cross-referenced by official and commercial actors in an undesired way. Furthermore, the inclusion of biometrical measures, such as iris scanning, fingerprinting, and DNA, is felt by many to be intrusive, producing an emotional response similar to the fear raised by the possibility of leaked or misused information. My use of the term resistance should in this context be understood in an inclusive and suggestive manner with regards to what passes for a surveillance situation. I am looking at the interrelated behavioral pattern between someone who deliberately wants to avoid being identified and those who are equally deliberate in installing identification technologies. This pattern points to a range of situations that we might not traditionally associate with formal surveillance discourse. Although there is almost always a political dimension to gestures of resistance to surveillance related technology, there are also works discussed here that take up a more playful form of expression, as well as intent. The centrality of the face for many surveillance strategies and technologies, and the subsequent fears raised, may however soon prove to be a thing of the past. Lawful



Face Blind

631

evidence of identity before the advent of the camera was centered on the signature of one’s name, a procedure that never went away, of course. In this case, documents attesting to a person’s identity carried no visual reproduction. The importance of the photograph on identity cards, passports, driving licenses, and so on, is now in question as these verify identity less and less through the image and more on recorded biometrical data that are thought to be harder to manipulate. For now, however, the representation of the face as evidence of self still remains of great importance in most spheres of our existence; the social, the political, and the judicial, to mention a few. The industry of developing ever more advanced facial recognition systems (FRS) and their various applications attests to the importance of identifying individuals through their facial features. Lyon notes that “the means of identification are increasingly associated with biometrics,” and continues, “This is true of not only of law enforcement and intelligence services, but also of commerce, employment, and other areas of life” (2009: 111). These biometric devices are not solely focused on the face, but also iris, fingerprint, voice-print, handprint, and so on. Referencing Alphonse Bertillon’s famous archive of photographs of criminals in Paris in the late nineteenth century, Lyon goes on to distinguish the shift the image of the face has undergone as site for identification: “The face, once carefully measured and mapped by hand,” Lyon writes, “is now captured by camera to create a template of unique features that may then be instantly compared with others within the system” (111). The system Lyon refers to is the series of vast databases these technologies rely on. Soon, every time we pass a border when traveling, our faces will be exposed and tested according to the logic of a face recognition system. Relatively simple versions of these applications can be found in most cameras sold today, even within our smart phones. The applications identify where and how many faces there are in the image and then optimize the image so as to render the faces in the best possible manner as far as focus and exposure is concerned. There are even models that will not take the picture until a smile is detected by the depicted subject. One can set the parameters depending on what facial feature you prefer: More impressive, the camera can detect different degrees of smiles in folks you photograph. Simply set Smile Level sensitivity to “high” and it will detect a faint smile. The “medium” level detects a normal smile, whatever that is. Set it to “low” if you want to capture a “hearty laugh.” (Bjork, n.d.)

There are also functions that do not identify individual facial affect, but only signal the presence of a face, such as the detection system used by Google Streetview, for example, which only seeks to find faces in their archive in order to blur them, that is to render them unidentifiable – at least to a stranger.2 We should, however, note that other quantifiable information can still be drawn from these images in which subjects are defaced: we can still identify (or we can entertain the idea that we can identify) other aspects of the people we see: class, level of affluence, race, age, gender, and so on. An easy-use automated face-blurring application for journalists and human rights activists called Secure Smart Camera (SSC) was

632

Patrik Sjöberg

developed and launched in 2011 by the Video for Change Initiative and The Guardian Project. The technology aims to protect the identity of, for example, the people in the background when an activist in a demonstration is interviewed on camera. While the activist may have given consent to have his or her face shown, or asked that it be blurred, other demonstrators in the background may still be identifiable and thereby endangered, say by the very forces that the demonstrators are protesting against. The SSC function called Visual Obfuscation renders bystanders faces blurred or intensely pixilated to the extent that this leaves them unidentifiable in any easy or immediate way.

Strategies for Surveillance Resistance Gary Marx, one of the leading theorists of surveillance cultures, has attempted to widen the understanding of surveillance studies by expanding not only the field which we can define as surveillance, but also by drawing on approaches not directly related to surveillance. In an article from 2003, Marx set out to chart some basic behavioral strategies for subverting surveillance through “eleven easy moves.”3 The seventh of these, which he calls “Masking moves,” is most relevant to what will be discussed here: Masking involves blocking in that the original information is shielded, but it goes beyond it to involve deception with respect to the identity, status and/or location/ locatability of the person or material of surveillance interest. Specifically, masking shares with one form of blocking the goal of eliminating genuine identifying marks (e.g., by removing serial numbers or wearing gloves or a generic mask) but it differs from them by replacing what is blocked with information intended to mislead, such as using a disguise or fake serial numbers. … As a result of masking, the surveillance mechanism operates as intended but the information collected is misleading and useless. Surveillors may not even realize that this has happened. (Marx, 2003)

These situations are familiar from countless films and television programs in which some version of a law enforcement agency is trying to pinpoint the location from where a telephone call is being made in order to track the geographical position of the caller. As narrative conventions require, the caller must be held on the line for a certain period of time for the call to be traced, thus superimposing the temporal upon the geographical through the technological. A nonsensical dialogue between the officer and the caller takes place until the moment before the geographical positioning is confirmed, the caller hangs up, obviously aware of the length of time required for the technology to locate his position. During this nonsensical dialogue, we are able to follow the tracing of the call. If the caller has the means and competence, we get to follow how the call has been rerouted to all kinds of servers and relays all over the world, either to delay discovery or to render it impossible.



Face Blind

633

The software TrackMeNot works according to a similar logic. TrackMeNot is specifically designed for the search engine Firefox and can be added to an individual computer to render searches and pattern of activities unintelligible for any third party that seeks to monitor the activity of the user. In an article that analyzes the design and efficiency of this specific software, Daniel C. Howe and Helen Nissenbaum (2009) describe the program accordingly: “TrackMeNot (TMN) is a lightweight Firefox browser extension designed to achieve privacy in web search by obfuscating a user’s actual searches amidst a stream of programmatically generated decoy searches.” The actual pattern of web use is lost, or at least rendered useless for any commercial or governmental targeting strategies. These types of counter-moves are identified by Gary Marx as a key component in the ongoing development of ever new surveillance technologies; that is, deliberate and more or less organized acts of subversions to the system, which will provoke the agency behind the surveillance to counter this measure by finding ways to go around or decode the scrambler, which in turn leads to further and more advanced subversions, and so on: Humans are wonderfully inventive at finding ways to beat control systems and to avoid observation. Most surveillance systems have inherent contradictions, ambiguities, gaps, blind spots and limitations, whether structural or cultural, and, if they do not, they are likely to be connected to systems that do. (Marx, 2003)

Introducing an issue of Surveillance and Society dedicated to “Surveillance and Resistance,” the editors reviewed the diverse and multifaceted nature of surveillance studies in general, and counter-surveillance strategies in particular: Understanding resistance in such a multi-layered way allows us to capture the different aspects of resistance within surveilled worlds, along with its multiple ontologies, and offer an interdisciplinary treatment of resistance that accounts for a wide array of actors and resistance relationships. (Martin, van Brakel, and Bernhard, 2009)

Building on work by organizational theorists such as Prasad and Prasad (2002), Ball (2005) focuses on biometric surveillance in the workplace. Ball locates resistance at the nexus where the body and technology intersect. She offers strategies of resistance to bodily surveillance including “disrupting flows of information from the body to the information system, disrupting the time it takes to encode the body, coding the body in an alternative way, and moving the interface/boundary between the body and surveillance system” (2005: 104). Ball suggests two inherent assumptions: (a) the person under observation is an autonomous agent capable of interacting with both technologies and observers, and (b) resistance emerges because surveillance is recognized and rejected as abnormal and unnatural. Thus the surveyor-surveilled relationship is her prime concern. Mann, Nolan, and Wellman (2003) perpetuate this binary focus, proposing “sousveillance” as a counter to surveillance. Sousveillance uses technology to confront bureaucratic organizations by mimicking the behavior of the surveillance authority, holding a mirror to surveyors

634

Patrik Sjöberg

and asking: “Do you like what you see?” Sousveillance resonates with Marx’s proposal to resist surveillance through non-compliance and interference: blocking, distorting, masking, refusing, and counter-surveilling. Here, the concept of sousveillance echoes the logic behind the anonymous interview in documentary film in regard to both the visual and the audio/speech/the voice. For we could regard acts of sousveillance as any deliberate act to change or draw attention to the dynamics of surveillance situations. Sousveillance then, is conceptual as well as activist and does not differentiate between more or less intrusive surveillance technologies, but rather addresses the action, and idea, of being submitted to surveillance as such. Thus, today, sousveillance is basically all the time everywhere. The complexity of the surveillance landscape and the level of engagement it takes to resist it is not only addressed in academic discussions but also through works like David Bond and Melinda MacDougall’s documentary film Erasing David (2010) and by Frank M. Ahearn, one of the leading experts in the field of finding people and helping people to disappear, who in his book How to Disappear promises to teach the reader how to “erase your digital footprint, leave false trails, and vanish without a trace” (Ahearn, 2010). In Erasing David, David Bond hires two detectives to track him down and his aim is then to evade their scrutiny by avoiding the intricate surveillance practices around him, and minimizing the trail he leaves behind. The detectives undertake conventional surveillance – going through his garbage and watching his home – but their main focus is on the information already available about Bond in diverse databases; information that goes back to his childhood, involves his extended family, financial situation, consumer patterns, and so on. They also monitor his mobile phone usage, as well as tracing his credit card use, whether he withdrew cash from a machine or used it to pay for goods or services, such as buying a ticket to travel somewhere – something Bond was very careful to avoid. These are all actions taken to obstruct David Bond in his ambition to disappear. In the end he fails, for his self-hired detectives locate him. Although Bond had consulted Ahearn in the making of his film to help him evade capture, he was caught out by minor slip-ups such as the times that he checked his email from an Internet café, or when at one point he answers his mobile phone. The film draws attention to all the tangents we have with technology that carry a potential for surveillance, even though surveillance might not be their primary function. Ahearn’s book is mostly a hands-on manual with practical advice and concerns for anyone who has, for reasons unclear, decided to disappear: to exist outside the grasp of conventional data gathering technologies. Instead of considering these surveillance technologies from the perspective of their technological attributes (audio, video, Internet tracking, etc.), it might be more fruitful to consider the situations in which they are active. Here, we should differentiate whether the situation is formal, semi-formal, or informal. This loose set of typologies allows us to get away from treating individual or group surveillance as particular and discrete technologies of surveillance, and instead emphasize particular surveillance situations within a larger surveillance culture. Formal surveillance includes things such as CCTV cameras in public places, going through customs at



Face Blind

635

airports, and similar situations; semi-formal surveillance includes, for example, Google monitoring of your Internet searches so as to send the proper advertisement to your computer, or Amazon sending you recommendations based on previous purchases; and informal surveillance is the scopic and auditory regimes that saturate the social (“being aware of other people’s attention”), and their technological extensions – such as mobile phones with cameras, YouTube, and Facebook – all with their particular history, agents, and dynamics.

The Anonymous Subject Whistleblowers, witnesses, informants, activists, graffiti artists, drug dealers, illegal immigrants in hiding, bystanders, police officers, people who by accident appear on Google Streetview, and other people who for one reason or another cannot, or don’t want to, publicly reveal their identity by having their faces shown, have become regular features of documentary media. These subjects are blacked out, blurred, out of focus, pixelated, silhouetted, creatively lit, wearing hats and sunglasses, hoods, scarves and bandanas; they are viewed from a great distance, they are sitting with their back to the camera, they are animated, they are fragmented into enlarged close-ups of details of their face or body, or they are altogether absent from the image. The voice of the person can be scrambled, muffled, or otherwise manipulated, out of sync, or appear as written text, or an actor’s voice used instead to speak the words. I find sequences that use such devices very rich, densely layered with mediations and ambiguous meanings that provoke questions regarding embodiment or the voice in documentary media. Today, technologies of concealment rather than clarity and making things visible, are a strong current in the discourse of our field, and indeed, for the conventions surrounding cinema, photography, and audio recordings in general. The link between the hidden subject in documentary films and acts of sousveillance is perhaps too obvious to stress, but let’s remember that any camera is also potentially a surveillance camera. The speaking subject in the documentary, like the bank robber wearing a ski mask so as not to be identified by the cameras and the subsequent judicial consequences, is often the speaking subject who wishes to remain hidden for other reasons: professional, social, or family related. Winter Soldier is a 1972 film of an event organized by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) from January 31 to February 2, 1971 that has the opposite concern. Through the testimonies from Vietnam veterans, the film makes public the atrocities perpetrated by the US military and their allies in the Vietnam War which they had witnessed and, for some, participated in,4 so as to fully authenticate the identities of those testifying, regardless of the risks. In a review of the film, critic Amos Vogel (1972) wrote that there is “simply no substitute for seeing the faces of the men as they testify, their strain, tears, hesitation, and artless innocence.” Vogel, here, loosely affiliates himself with what we perhaps could refer to as a metaphysics of presence, however complex and mediated. It also opens the field for a number of

636

Patrik Sjöberg

discussions of the represented face, perhaps most obviously by inviting Emmanuel Levinas’s theories of the human face as a key interface to self-realization through a proper and just experience of the Other. Levinas’s understanding of the face as an inter-face to the Other then could be, if not reversed, rearticulated: what meeting occurs with the Other when the face is deliberately withheld? How should we qualify this difference? There are variations on this theme, or line of questions, found in Emile de Antonio’s film Underground (1974), where we encounter subjects hidden in a deliberate and conscious way. The actual concealment is made in a very simple and low-tech manner: by either shooting them talking through a semi-transparent fabric, or shooting at a mirror that leaves the spectator with the view of the subjects’ backs. These solutions are sometimes enhanced by lighting and through the use of hats and sunglasses. The subjects, however, are not anonymous in the film, they are just not identifiable during the interviews. Photographs of the subjects from just a few years before they were filmed are featured throughout the film. Also, the subjects are all named. None of the voices are manipulated. There could be practical and historical reasons for this, or there could be political and ideological reasons. For example, Sergei Eisenstein engaged with the human face in his films as a means to portray a collective, to give the masses a voice, and not as singular individuals. Jonathan Kahana makes similar observations in relation to Underground, and at the same time resonates with Vogel’s comments about the soldiers in Winter Soldier: By defacing the fugitives and detaching their faces from their voices, the filmmakers challenge one of the commonplaces of liberal and left documentary of the period: that marginal subjects must be represented in a way that preserves their integrity, restoring to them a voice and a proper interiority. (Kahana, 2008: 196)

Vogel and Kahana, in different circumstances and for different reasons, both touch upon the ethical dimension of showing, or not showing, a face and what this potentially means for the depicted subject, and ultimately, for the manner that his or her testimony will be received. While some faces may be obscured in documentary cinema, the voice is most often not. In Jonas Odell’s animated documentary Aldrig som första gången (Never Like the First Time, 2006), a series of people testify, anonymously, to the circumstances around which they lost their virginity. Those interviewed range from people in their early 20s to pensioners. The stories told are anything from recent alcohol-saturated rape testimonials, to romantic episodes in springtime Stockholm in the 1930s. Each testimony is animated and the person telling his or her story is free to be completely honest in knowing that their identity is kept hidden throughout the film. The anonymity of the speaking subject becomes the artistic drive for the film itself, where the content and sensibility of each account determines the style and technology used for the individual animated story. Besides its playfulness and the ambition to artistically and stylistically embrace and elaborate on this withdrawal from conventional visibility, Odell’s film also invites us to



Face Blind

637

consider how intimacy and identity is presented, or performed, in contemporary documentary media. The frankness of the stories told, in the voices of the people themselves, with all the intonation, breathing, affected pauses, class, age, and other acoustically transmitted data about the person, results in a detailed and intimate portrait of a person through an anecdote from their life, without ever offering a face to the spectator. The film alerts us to what Roland Barthes (1977) referred to as “the grain of the voice,”5 that is, all the extra-linguistic information about the speaking subject that can be heard, or perceived: the age of the person speaking, level of education, gender, perhaps race, dialects, whether the person is a smoker, on the verge of crying, or has a small or great speech impediment. All these factors render the absence of a representation of the face as a less determining factor than one might expect. The balance between disclosure and withdrawal, between visibility and invisibility, is not only respected and upheld, it is accentuated and rearticulated in the film. It can be understood as an extension of the logic and primal force of surveillance culture, “Identification is the starting point of surveillance.” The represented subjects in Never Like the First Time, while not identified by a name that can be attached and secured to the voice, are represented as speaking subjects with an identity articulated in an oral performance of their subjective experiences, and this is not trivial. The film demonstrates that there are degrees of anonymity. Although the speaking position for the various people in Never Like the First Time is heavily mediated and aestheticized and morphs and mutates according to the story told, the subject can be identified through his or her voice, hence the use of ­technologies for distorting the recorded voice. If we were to entertain the idea that we are able to identify people from their voice and/or speech acts alone, and much indicates that we can, with or without advanced technologies, how accurate is this verification? Most of us would recognize the voice of our children, parents, siblings, and partner, but how about our co-workers? Our neighbors? The person working in the store where you are a regular customer? To leave the voice intact, or at least not obviously manipulated with the intent to obscure its point of origin, opens up the possibility that there are people who will recognize these subjects. The topic of the film, the way their respective sexual debut was played out, is not so much a life and death concern as it is one of potential embarrassment and personal ­discomfort, and so to be identified might not be a central concern for the participants after all. In Odell’s Tussilago (2010), he again presents an anonymous subject, identified only as A, and the story of her involvement as the Swedish then-girlfriend of Norbert Köcher, a West German terrorist convicted for planning to kidnap the Swedish minister Anna-Greta Leijon in 1977. Odell animates the testimony of A by using live action footage with actors reconstructing events, together with still images of those actually involved, and processing these in a rotoscope camera, cutting them up, painting on them, and treating them according to ­various graphic processes.6 Moreover, Tussilago becomes a rhetorical impasse on representations of anonymity, as Odell chose to render anonymous the actors

638

Patrik Sjöberg

Figure 29.1 and Figure 29.2  Aldrig som första gången (Never Like the First Time, Jonas Odell, 2006, produced by FilmTecknarna).

depicted in the re-enactments in the film alongside the actual images, referencing both the historical context that produced the requirement of anonymity, and the  aesthetics of masking, as if asking the spectator to consider not who is that person behind the mask but rather: who is it that I think I am not seeing right now?



Face Blind

639

Figure 29.3 and Figure 29.4  Tussilago (Jonas Odell, 2010, produced by FilmTecknarna, Film i Väst, and Svenska Filminstitutet).

Odell’s films are meticulously constructed using a wide variety of imagery, sounds, and voice, raising questions about the archive, the nature of audiovisuality, and the construction/representation of identity as a form of mediated enactment. Different issues of masking arise where an individual is at risk of legal and other consequences to speaking out. But what happens when the topic is even more acute,

640

Patrik Sjöberg

when there is more at stake and there are real consequences to be suffered if the represented subject was to be identified? In Avi Mograbi’s film Z32 (2008), a former Israeli soldier gives testimony about a revenge raid he participated in while in the army, in which he killed two Palestinians. The young man and his girlfriend agree to talk about the incident on the condition that their faces remain hidden. Mograbi approaches the issue of the hidden speaking subject with his trademark reflexive style, in which he also inserts himself, as a biographical Mograbi, and also at times as other more or less fictive characters. The manner in which the masking of the faces is carried out draws attention to itself in that it continuously shifts and changes. Mograbi constructs a set of digital masks that he at different times in the film pastes on to the faces of the young man and his girlfriend. In the beginning of the film, Mograbi establishes his hidden subjects by having their faces blurred, but blurred in a specific way. It is more fuzzy than just out of focus. Also, he has made little holes in this fuzzy digital mask for the eyes and mouth. The fuzzy cloud stays with the face in a very distinct manner regardless of head movements and creates a certain visual effect. Later in the film, and without any indication as to why, the fuzzy cloud surrounding the head and face is exchanged for a digital clay-like mask that is pasted onto the face of the subject (the soldier). Again, as he moves his head, the grafted mask of concealment cleverly protects the soldier from being identified. It therefore comes as something of a shock for the viewer when, toward the end of the film, we get to see the face of the soldier. Or so we are allowed to think for several minutes. The technique of concealment this time is a hyper-realistic face of a young man that is, just as the earlier disguises, pasted digitally on to the soldier’s face. The viewer only becomes privy to this replacement when the soldier scratches his face during the interview and we get to see the hand disappear underneath the digital face. For Mograbi, clearly, this is not simply a game of representations, or a technical bravado (although it is that as well), but rather this is an investigation into the possibilities and limitations of testimony and its relation to documentary conventions. It also serves as a profound comment on the tension that exists between embodiment and technology, begging not only the question, “Who is this and what is he saying?” but also, “Who is it that I think that I’m listening to?” The central metaphor for analyzing these defaced and partially disembodied subject is not, as has often been the case, Michel Chion’s conception of the acousmêtre, but rather of ventriloquism.7 In his PhD thesis, “Ventriloquism: Identity and the Multiple Voice” (1997), Charles Bruce Davis aptly writes: The strongest taxonomic link between these various “ventriloquisms” is the signification of an other identity to which the responsibility for speech is deflected, whether through cultural belief, deceptive illusion, or within the self-reflexive frame of a surprisingly wide range of performance forms. The central question, then, is, “Who is speaking?” or in a more precise semiotic and historical context, “Who did who think was speaking, and to whom?” This is a question of signification and reception, of identification in cultural and historical context, and of accountability for what acts of speech can do. Ventriloquism foregrounds “voice” not as individual expression or



Face Blind

641

linguistic “point of view,” but as a signification of an identity that is always under construction in a give and take dialogue not only with other “voices” but with every variety of cultural restraint which language and bodies place on communication. (Davis, 1997: ii)

Furthermore, both the soldier and the girlfriend remain nameless throughout the film, and their voices are scrambled and manipulated, producing a speaking subject that doesn’t look or sound like anyone we could ever encounter in real life. What kind of subject is it then? How far can we carry this mediated anonymity – when we no longer can distinguish a proper subject, that is, when we can no longer make out whether the speaking subject is man or woman, how old he or she is, where dialect and all other grains of the voice is rendered illegible through the scrambling and muffling of the voice? How does the elusive contract of faith between the spectator and the documentary film stand up to such a test? Gillian Wearing is an English artist and photographer who address similar questions of identity and self-image by also drawing on such ventriloquisms. Using conceptual photography, re-enactments, and role-play in film, Wearing probes strategies for accessing hidden or less obvious strata of our personalities. Wearing advertised for people to come and retell a troubling episode from their life for the camera, and this became her video installation, Secrets and Lies (2009). The identity of the participating subjects is hidden by masks they wear while being filmed, framed in medium close-up, looking directly at the camera. What creates a moving and, at the same time, disturbing effect is the combination of the masks and the intimacy of the stories told. Most of the masks are made of latex and resemble creatures you find in a horror or science-fiction film. Others include animal heads or just completely deconstructed human faces. Some of them would probably have been comic in another context, others are more uncanny. Here however, they produce, in conjunction with the voice of the hidden subject and the stories told, a distinct tension in the spectator. The anonymity is part of the conceptual frame rather than required to protect the participants, and draws attention to itself as media and as art, thereby splitting our attention between what is said, and what we see, invoking our informal surveillance and its assumptions of propriety. It also invites speculation, such as: I wonder would come out of most people if they would be given a head-covering latex mask, a camera, and a secluded space?8 The German artist, Martin Backes, also presents a performance of masking in Pixelhead, constructing a full-head mask to wear in public spaces to avoid identification by surveillance cameras. Or, at least, that’s what he wants us to consider through the work. The mask, Pixelhead, designed by Liza Sander, is made with satin fabric printed with large pixels that mimic the way a face pixellates when being increasingly enlarged, or zoomed into, on a screen. Pixelhead is a conceptual piece, asking us to consider the potential need for such an anti-surveillance device. This is playfully, but also politically emphasized by using for the image modeled on the fabric the face of Thomas de Maizière who, as the German Secretary of the Interior, is responsible for state surveillance.

642

Patrik Sjöberg

What Martin Backes somewhat playfully references with Pixelhead, the Berlin-based anonymous group of theorists and artists called U.R.A. developed into a project that is perhaps less tongue in cheek. They created a machine-tomachine surveillance subversion based on the primary functions of infrared technology. The device, I.-R.A.S.C. (infrared light against surveillance cameras), is a small contraption mounted on the head of the user via an elastic headband with a circle of infrared LEDs at the front, that transmits infrared light around the head of the user, rendering him or her unidentifiable by other infrared cameras. Infrared radiation was discovered in the early nineteenth century, and was developed as a technology for photographing, filming, or undertaking surveillance at night or under circumstances where there is little to no light. The darkness that historically awarded the subject a degree of anonymity in that the human eye could not properly identify a subject under poor light conditions, was undone with the advent of, first, gas street lighting, then Edison’s light-bulb, and now, infrared technology. That darkness is recovered by the subversion of the infrared capacity of surveillance devices through the use of the I.-R.A.S.C., which is demonstrated by the group through a short video showing how the figure in the footage is rendered anonymous, not by being blacked out, but the very opposite, by being lit up.9 The halo of light surrounding the wearer’s head makes it impossible to make out his or her face. The invisibility of the infrared technology, that is the fact that it relies on light that has longer wavelengths than visible light (at a frequency between 780 nm and 1 mm), makes it impossible to detect whether a surveillance device is equipped with infrared technology or not, and this corresponds perfectly with its subversion, which is also invisible to the human eye. What we have is a surveillance sphere, or surveillance battle, outside the domain of the somatic experience, in which both the surveillance and its undoing can only be registered through the technology deployed, that is, to see the undermining effect of the I.-R.A.S.C. you need to watch it through infrared devices. Pixelhead and I.-R.A.S.C. are both contemporary works that engage with current surveillance technology, however the use of camouflage to avoid detection has a long history in relation to deceiving the gaze of the camera rather than fooling the eye of a human observer. In her conceptual study, Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance, Hanna Rose Shell writes an intellectual history of “camouflage media.” Camouflage, Shell writes, “unfolds in time and space, across disciplinary boundaries, as an adaptive logic of escape from photographic representation” (Shell, 2012: 19). Shell traces the development of military camouflage during the First World War and how it was closely linked to aerial photography as a means of detecting enemy troops and their ambition to hide their whereabouts. Again, the camouflage was not tuned and primed for the immediate human vision, but mediated vision. “As aerial photography and camouflage rapidly co-developed during World War I,” Shell writes, “optical technologies, natural landscapes, and human skills fused in the production of revolutionary photographic tableau.” Shell continues:



Face Blind

643

As photographic emulsions improved, new filters made additional details of shape, shade and hue visible. Camouflage technologies responded in turn, adaptively, so as to avoid detection by infrared, orthochromatic, and panchromatic films, as well as by a host of color filter overlays. (2012: 116)

Again, we can see the co-dependency between the development of surveillance technology, on the one hand, and acts to evade detection on the other hand, which in turn sparks the development of new technologies, producing new behavior on behalf of the observed. It is interesting to see that how Shell views the act of disguising oneself – to step in and participate in the dynamic spectrum that oscillates between surveillance and camouflage media – can also be viewed as something creative and as a running commentary on self-construction and performativity. The act of camouflage, Shell suggests, becomes a way to investigate the relation between the self and the environment in a way “that efface the traces of one’s own presence in photographic media of surveillance,” and she continues, “It is camouflage consciousness, in which full self-consciousness becomes literal photographic self-analysis” (2012: 23).

Face Blindness Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, is a condition in which the individual is unable to remember the face of a person, or keeping the faces of various people apart; in short, to secure a face to a stable subject that belongs to the real world. The symptoms can vary in severity, from having a slightly lessened ability to remember people’s faces, to one of profound confusion where coping in the every day is a constant struggle. Inducing a sort of controlled and mediated prosopagnosia, Adam Harvey developed a particular make-up strategy, CV Dazzle, that renders the face unrecognizable to surveillance technologies equipped with a face tracking system. The makeup strategy, that also includes particular hair styles, takes its name from the Dazzle pattern in which battleships were painted during the First World War for camouflage, as noted earlier by Shell. Harvey starts from an analysis of how most face tracking systems work, what features of the face are analyzed, and how they are combined to form a quantifiable face-image that can be cross-referenced in a database of stored face-images to form a match – not unlike how databases of fingerprints work. Again, like the painted ships of the First World War, the painting is not executed to hide the ship, but rather to confuse the technologies that are trying to collect data on it. According to Harvey, there are some key areas of the face where properly applied make-up will make it hard for face tracking systems to collect the data necessary, for example, the bridge where the nose connects with the forehead. Furthermore, the eyes should not be enhanced, and areas of the face should be highlighted differently on right and left sides, since the system will, cartographically, look for symmetries in the facial topography and measure the distances between easily identified peaks and valleys, such as cheekbones, for example. Harvey describes his project as follows: “CV

644

Patrik Sjöberg

Dazzle™ is camouflage from computer vision (CV) … the goal of CV Dazzle is to break apart the gestalt of a face, or object, and make it undetectable to computer vision algorithms, in particular face detection” (see cvdazzle.com). Here, we should make the distinction between the digital surveillance technologies mentioned, and the traditional camera. CV Dazzle might trick a face tracking device, but not a regular camera.

Conclusions This essay has addressed two parallel and closely related projects and their theorization: sousveillance, or the deliberate and conscious act of detecting, avoiding, and subverting surveillance technologies and surveillance cultures; and the striving for modes of anonymity in general, and specifically, the wish to have the face unidentifiable in media contexts. The point of departure in this discussion has been the anonymous interview in documentary works. Although most of the examples are from documentary films, there are also examples from video installations as well as technology related activism and actions. Given how the field of documentary studies is understood today, that is, in a highly inclusive and expansive way, this should come as no surprise. What we can see is that when we look closer at all these hidden speaking subjects in documentary films – at how they are disguised, why, and with what implications this may have for the statements made by the hidden subject as well as for the documentary work as a whole – we also gain insights into the motives behind the ever growing resistance to the surveillance cultures of our everyday lives, whether formal, semi-formal, or informal. Many people’s wish not to have their face (or identity) recorded and cross-referenced in a database, for whatever reason and regardless of consequences for them, must be read together with the ongoing debates in many countries about the individual’s identifiability in public spaces, for example, whether it should be legal to be masked/anonymous in political demonstrations (or attending a football game), or the right for women to wear clothing such as niqab and burka required by some Moslem communities when they are outside the home, in public, or at the workplace. Some of the discussions in the text are centered around the representations of these subjects as we meet them in documentary films, news, and television journalism, and what it means to encounter a subject to whom you are denied a face, and sometimes also a voice. What gets represented is not only the distorted version of a face, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the reason why the subject needs to be anonymous in the first place. This notion is conceptually inscribed over these backlit and blurred faces. This mediated facelessness shares common ground with the situation that arises when subjects are exposed to surveillance in the public space against their will, prompting some basic democratic questions: Is it a human right not to have to reveal your face in public? And if not, how so? What exceptions to these rules could be considered acceptable, and what principles should guide such discussions: social, political, moral, judicial, or religious? One way forward could be to intensify the study of the shared territory of surveillance studies, on the one hand, and the ever more inclusive discourse surrounding the study of documentary media. This text could be viewed as one such attempt.



Face Blind

645

Notes 1 Face tracking technologies are here understood to include any program, software, or strategy to identify individuals by having their faces recognized and, often, cross-referenced to some version of database. 2 Again, given that the blurred individual found on Google Streetview can be found walking down a named street, or even outside a specific address, in combination with the fact that the rest of his body is not blurred, chances are that people living on that street, or in that small village, will be able to identify the subject. Defacement doesn’t automatically render someone unidentifiable to everybody, the vast amount of information found in other contextual factors in the image can undo the central ambition of the blurring of faces alone. 3 These eleven strategies are: 1. Discovery moves, 2. Avoidance moves, 3. Piggy-back moves, 4. Switching moves, 5. Distorting moves, 6. Blocking moves, 7. Masking moves, 8. Breaking moves, 9. Refusal moves, 10. Cooperative moves, and 11. Counter-surveillance moves. 4 The three-day gathering of 109 veterans and 16 civilians took place in Detroit, Michigan. Discharged servicemen from each branch of military service, as well as civilian contractors, medical personnel, and academics, all gave testimony about war crimes they had committed or witnessed during the years 1963–1970. Each veteran’s authenticity was checked before the hearings by the investigation event organizers, and subsequently by reporters and Pentagon officials. In addition, they also gave specific details about their units and the locations where the events had occurred. Those who wanted to testify were carefully screened by the officers of VVAW, and care was taken to verify the service records and testimony of the veterans. 5 Barthes defines it accordingly: “It is this displacement that I want to outline, not with regard to the whole of music but simply to a part of vocal music (Lied or mélodie): the very precise space (genre) of the encounter between a language and a voice. I shall straight away give a name to this signifier at the level of which, I believe, the temptation of ethos can be liquidated (and thus the adjective banished): the grain, the grain of the voice when the latter is in a dual posture, a dual production – of language and of music” (1977: 184). 6 For further discussion on animated documentaries and the use of rotoscope cameras in particular, see Annabelle Honess Roe (2012). 7 I have elaborated on the connection between ventriloquism and the anonymous interview in a presentation titled “Blurred Figures of Speech” which was presented at the Documentary Now! Conference 2011 in London, and at Visible Evidence XVIII in New York. It also forms the base for a chapter in a forthcoming book on the speaking subject in documentary media. 8 Another conceptual artist who elaborates and investigates the nature of surveillance technologies and the unexpected situations and behaviors they breed is Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. It is also interesting to see how the experiential context of the piece, much like Wearing’s, is in art museums and art galleries rather than in documentary film. His piece, The Year’s Midnight (2011), is founded on a custom-built face tracking system that forms the central ingredient of this interactive installation piece. The surveillance technology is built into a high-resolution display monitor and is connected to a computerized tracking system and a camera that singles out a single face from the group of spectators in front of the display. What the spectators see are themselves looking at themselves with the difference that smoke comes out of one, only one, of the spectator’s eyes. Regardless of how he or she moves about in the space in front of the display, the smoke stays with this person. The effect is one of horror and beauty, as well as a haunting sensation of being

646

Patrik Sjöberg

singled out, of being followed by the camera and given up to the art work in real time. A side effect of the profuse smoke and light emanating from the eyes of one of the spectators, is that it renders him or her anonymous; partly obscured by the smoke, but more importantly, by being robbed of one’s eyes – which also echoes the classical way of rendering a subject in print media by blacking out the eyes. The presence of the fellow spectators, who are of course not distorted and followed by the technology, makes this contrast even greater. Lozano-Hemmer allows for the visitor/spectator to play with this sensation, the sensation of being tracked by surveillance technology, under controlled circumstances, without obvious consequences; social, judicial, or other. Instead of prompting an impulse to escape, or avoid, the observing and registering technology, we are instead, perhaps, invited to consider: now, how does this work? How does this make me feel? 9 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJBvVDZLe7o, accessed August 9, 2014.

References Ahearn, Frank M. (2010) How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish Without a Trace. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press. Ball, Kirstie S. (2005) Organization, Surveillance and the Body. Organization, 12(1), 89–108. Barthes, Roland (1977) Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press. Bjork, Gail (n.d.) Smile: Cheesy Camera Mode. Digicamhelp.com, http://www.digicamhelp. com/camera-logs/gimmicks/cheesy-feature/, accessed August 9, 2014. Davis, Charles Bruce (1997) Ventriloquism: Identity and the Multiple Voice. PhD thesis, University of Washington. Howe, Daniel C. and Nissenbaum, Helen (2009) TrackMeNot: Resisting Surveillance in Web Search. In Kerr, Ian, Lucock, Carole, and Steeves, Valerie (eds.) Lessons from the Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society, pp. 417–436. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kahana, Jonathan (2008) Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary. New York: Columbia University Press. Lyon, David (2009) Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveillance. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mann, Steve, Nolan, Jason, and Wellman, Barry (2003) Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments. Surveillance and Society, 1(3), 331–355. Martin, Aaron K., van Brakel, Rosamunde E., and Bernhard, Daniel J. (2009) Understanding Resistance to Digital Surveillance: Towards a Multi-Disciplinary, Multi-Actor Framework. Surveillance and Society, 6(3), 213–232. Marx, Gary (2003) Tack in the Shoe: Neutralizing and Resisting the New Surveillance. Journal of Social Issues, 59(2), 369–390. Prasad, Anshuman and Prasad, Pushkala (2002) The Coming of Age of Interpretive Organizational Research. Organizational Research Methods, 5(1), 4–11. Roe, Annabelle Honess (2012) Uncanny Indexes: Rotoscoped Interviews as Documentary. Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 7(1), 25–37. Shell, Hanna Rose (2012) Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance. New York: Zone Books. Vogel, Amos (1972) Atrocities and Artless Innocence. The Village Voice, February 3, http:// www.wintersoldierfilm.com/reviews_020372_voice.htm, accessed August 9, 2014.

Index

Page references for illustrations (where there is no other relevant information on the page) are in italics, e.g. 16. Titles of films, books, and artworks are in italics. 24 (TV series), 485 2MOVE (exhibition, 2008), 131–2, 141n 48 (2009), 478, 483, 491–502 Abeloos, Pierre, 607n–8n Abramovic, Marina, 528 Abrantes, Domingos, 499 Abu Ghraib, 7, 411, 414, 480n, 485, 489–91, 503n, 524–5, 529–30, 545, 603–5, 608n Abuza, Zachary, 398 Access Denied (2008), 128, 135–6 Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), 275–8, 279n, 298–312, 314–32 activists, 10–11, 256–7, 262, 275–6, 277, 300–12 Act of Killing, The (2012), 480 ACT UP Oral History Project, 276, 322–4, 328 activism, 16–17 AIDS activists, 10–11, 256–7, 262, 275–6, 277, 300–12 anti-war activists, 410–24 sex worker activists, 194–206

women’s rights activists, 222, 225–6, 228–9, 230n, 233–49 actors, 182, 185, 187 Addelman, Ben, 121 Adobe Photoshop (computer program), 615, 625n Adorno, Theodor W., 438, 440, 441, 443, 450n aesthetics, 38–9, 41n, 50–1, 54, 77, 141n, 150–2 anti-aesthetics, 166 digital documentaries, 573–8, 585–6, 604 of labor, 151–2, 155–72 masking, 638–43 microscopic images, 286–95 migratory documentary aesthetics, 7, 130–40 multisensory experiences, 244–6 perspective, 155–62 scientific documentaries, 281 ugliness, 169, 468 Afghanistan, 406–7, 457–9, 466–9, 536, 537, 548–53 Africa, 9, 90, 92–107, 213, 214, 217–29

A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

648 Index Africa Rising: The Grassroots Movement to End Female Genital Mutilation (2009), 223–7 African Americans, 117–18, 197, 220–2, 225, 252–67, 268n–9n Agadez (Niger), 103–6 Agamben, Giorgio, 239, 490, 501, 546 Age of Stupid, The (2009), 48–9, 50 agency, 16–17, 246–8, 528–30 agricultural workers, 117–18, 155–8, 162–5, 188–9 Ahearn, Frank M., 634 Ahluwalia, Ashim, 121 Ahmed, S., 537 Ahtila, Eija-Liisa, 142n Ai Weiwei, 159 AIDS/HIV, 275–8, 279n, 298–312, 314–32 activists, 10–11, 256–7, 262, 275–6, 277, 300–12 AIDS Jaago (2007), 277 AIDS Quilt Touch Project, 326–7, 328–9, 331 Aiken, Susana, 267n Akerman, Chantal, 473n Akhtar, Farhan, 279n Akomfrah, John, 48 Al Jazeera, 424n Alberta (Canada), 28, 34–6 Aldrig som första gången (2006), 636–7, 638 Alexander, Livia, 480n Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, 230n Allan, Catherine, 212 Allcock, J.B., 178 Alpert, Jon, 423, 472n Alsutany, Evelyn, 529, 534 Alter, Nora M., 7, 12, 15, 409, 433, 434, 460–1, 554n Althusser, Louis, 426n, 460 Alvi, Abrar, 206n American Civil Liberties Union, 541 Amir, Yigal, 381n AMSOPT (Association Malienne pour le Suivi et l’Orientation des Pratiques Traditionnelles), 224 anarchism, 185 And the Band Played On (1993), 275–6 Anderson, B., 49, 50, 56 Anderson Platoon, The (1986), 407, 415, 416

Andert Europa, Det (2006), 109–10 Andrews, M., 169 Andrjasevic, Rutvica, 108 animation, 46, 62, 275, 280, 281, 285, 289–95, 517, 636–9 Anleitung, Polizisten den Helm abzureissen (1969), 432 Annaud, Jean-Jacques, 344 anonymity, 629–44, 645n–6n anti-militarist movement, 471n anti-prostitution activism, 195–6 anti-realism, 180, 416–18, 425n–6n anti-war documentaries, 405, 409, 410–24, 425n, 426n, 433–8, 454–5, 460–71 anticipatory documentary, 43–57 antinomy, 37–8, 40–1 Antonio, Emile de, 434, 454, 563, 636 Aparicio, Carlos, 267n Apocalypse Now (1979), 515–16 apocalyptic scenarios, 40–1, 43–57 Apollo missions, 21–2 Appadurai, Arjun, 109, 414 Appleby, Scott, 380n appropriation, 134–5, 573–4 Aran, G., 381n Arce, Luz, 532, 535n archive footage, 600–5 Arendt, Hannah, 506, 520 Armadillo (2010), 456, 457–9, 472n Armstrong, Franny, 48–9 Armstrong, Nancy, 424n Artery: the AIDS-arts forum (website), 324–5 Arthurs, J., 193 Arthus-Bertrand, Yann, 23 Arts Catalyst, 55, 58n As You See (1986), 438 Asch, Timothy, 617–20 ASSA, 299 asylum seekers, 94–7 Atkins, Robert, 324 Atlas Group, 463–6 Atlas of Emotion (Bruno), 63 Attie, Barbara, 224 Aubervilliers (1946), 173n audio surveillance, 559, 565n Aufderheide, Patricia, 407, 415–16, 458 Auschwitz, 439–40, 441

Index 649 Austen, John, 142n authenticity, 49, 182, 187–8, 306–7, 511 authority, 10, 81n, 109, 219, 228, 262, 265, 378, 397, 404, 423, 524, 530, 549, 554, 571–3, 633–4 medical authority, 308–11 religious authority, 341, 344, 357 auto-theory, 124, 133–40 autobiographical documentaries, 63, 230n, 253, 255, 260–6, 267, 350–63, 517, 589–90 Awaken to AIDS (2007), 277 Ax Fight, The (1975), 617–20 axiographics, 254, 255–6, 267, 342 Aydemir, Murat, 142n Ba, S.M., 511 Baccolini, R., 47 Backes, Martin, 641–2 Bagram Air Base (Afghanistan), 548–53 Baichwal, Jennifer, 167 Baker, M.B., 150 Bal, Mieke, 4, 10, 90, 91, 124–33, 141n Ball, Kirstie S., 633 Ballester, Gonzalo, 132 Balmès, Thomas, 120–1 Balsamo, A., 329, 331, 332n Bandura, A., 509 Barad, K., 46 Baraka (1992), 339 Barker, Martin, 457 Barnett, J., 67 Barrada, Yto, 96 Barrell, J., 157, 166, 168, 169–70 Barthes, Roland, 361, 439, 613, 637, 645n Bartlett, Roscoe, 30–1, 37 Bataille, G., 76 Battle of Chile, The (1976, 1979), 235 Battle of Fallujah (2004), 425n Battle of San Pietro, The (1945), 407 Baudelaire, Charles, 157, 170 Baudrillard, Jean, 616 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 426n Bauman, Z., 47, 98 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 141n Bazin, André, 169, 171, 181, 292, 416, 419–20, 605

BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 542 Beat It! (TV series), 9, 16, 277–8, 298–312 Beckwith, Denise, 203–4 Becoming Vera (2008), 128–9 Becquer, Marcus, 256, 259 Before Your Eyes ‒ Vietnam (1982), 418, 450n Beganović, D., 181 Begg, Moazzam, 536–7, 538 Beimann, Ursula, 8 Beirut: The Last Home Movie (1988), 363n Bejarano, C., 233–4 Ben-Ari, E., 381n Ben-Gurion, David, 366 Ben-Yehuda, N., 366, 367–8, 381n Benedict XVI, 398 Benjamin, Walter, 12, 354, 439, 461, 462–3, 471, 494 Bennett, J., 171 Bennett, T., 44, 45, 57 Benning, James, 155–7, 158, 159, 167, 168–9 Bentham, Jeremy, 566, 567, 578n, 581, 582, 606n, 607n, 630 Berger, John, 164, 169, 172n, 244 Bergman, Ingrid, 595 Bergson, Henri, 422 Berlin, 134–5 Berlinger, Joe, 28 Berners-Lee, Tim, 316–17 Bernhard, Daniel J., 633 Bernstein, E., 202–3, 204 Bertillon, A., 491, 499, 631 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 344, 349–50 Berwick Street Collective, 418 Bessy, S., 72–3 Betrayal (1979), 387 Between Two Wars (1978), 435, 450n Beyond Awareness Campaign, 300–1 Bhabha, Homi, 134, 605 Bhardwaj, Vishal, 279n Biden, Joe, 186 Biemann, Ursula, 4, 10, 14, 15, 16, 90–1, 94, 103, 106, 228, 572 Bien-Aimé, Taina, 225, 231n Big Brother (TV series), 591–2 Bigelow, Kathryn, 457, 472n, 524

650 Index Bilder der Welt (1989), 418, 435, 438–42, 460–1 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 277, 279n Bio Visions, 290 biodiversity, 51, 52–4 bioinformatics, 274–5, 280–95 biometric data, 630–1, 633–4 Biressi, A., 305, 306 Birri, Fernando, 235, 248 Bjork, Gail, 631 Black Bus (2009), 373–7, 380, 381n Black Film (1971), 10, 182 Black God, White Devil (1964), 235 Black Sea Files (2005), 106–7 Black, Stephanie, 117–19 Blanchot, M., 76 Blaylock, Sara, 56 Blessings: The Tsoknyi Nangchen Nuns of Tibet (2009), 346 Bloch, E., 45 Blok, A., 50, 396 Blümlinger, Christa, 48, 169, 173n, 450n, 594, 596 Blurred Boundaries (Nichols), 49 Bodenhamer, D.J., 64, 81n bodhisattva, 343–4 Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Butler), 211 body, 255, 265–6, 268n, 375–7, 381n, 473n, 527–8, 545–6, 549–53 biometric data, 630–1, 633–4 body genre, 422–3 body sovereignty, 8–10, 195–6 Body of War (2007), 408 Bois, Yve-Alain, 133 Bolinsky, David, 291 Boltanski, L., 149, 150 Bombay Calling (2006), 121 Bond, David, 566, 567, 583–4, 589–90, 634 Booth, R., 147 Borat, Nati, 350 border crossings, 14–15, 92–107, 135–6, 571–3 Bordowitz, Gregg, 276, 330 Borgmann, Monika, 486–7 Born into Brothels (2004), 194 Bostrom, Denise, 212, 218

Bouazizi, Mohammed, 423 Bourriaud, Nicholas, 574 Bowden, Charles, 243–4, 249n Boyarin, D., 381n Boyle, Deirdre, 7, 10, 13, 16, 480, 519 Boyle, Elizabeth Heger, 229n Bozak, N., 24, 162, 163 Braceros program (1942‒1964), 121 Bradley, Mark P., 390 Braun, M., 282 Braun, Netalie, 369, 370–3 Brave New Films, 415 Brazil, Report on Torture (1971), 488 Brecht, Berthold, 150, 186, 421, 427n Bremer, Gloria, 219 Bresson, Robert, 580, 581 Bridge, The (2007), 10, 620–5, 626n–7n Briggs, Kevin, 622 Brighenti, Andrea Mubi, 581, 599 Bright Eyes (1984), 275 Brilliant, Richard, 138 Briski, Zana, 194 Broomfield, Nick, 110–11, 584 Brophy, Sarah, 331 Brother Number Two (Nuon Chea), 506, 509, 514–18, 521n Brown, Wendy, 461, 462 Brown, Will, 108 Bruno, Ellen, 507 Bruno, Giuliana, 4, 63 Bryson, N., 155, 157 Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama), 343–4 Buddhism, 9, 12, 340, 341–63, 386, 398 Buden, B., 180 budgets, films, 179, 182, 215, 434–5, 442–3, 450n Burawoy, M., 177, 178 Burch, Noël, 451n Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 563 Burshtein, Rama, 369 Burton, J., 320, 425n Burtynsky, E., 31 Bush, George W., 30, 546, 553 Bush, John, 346 Butler, Judith, 142n, 211, 248, 254, 257–9, 260, 263, 265, 267, 367, 371, 373, 457, 537, 538

Index 651 CADRE, 302 Cahiers du Cinéma, 419, 425n Callejas, Adolfo, 33–4, 36 Camara, Fanta, 227 Cambodia, 479, 503n, 506–20, 521n–2n Cameron, F.R., 69 Camp La Jolla (website), 577–8 Camp X-Ray, 545–8 Campbell, J., 67 Campbell, Russell, 425n Canada, 28, 34–6 Cançado, Wellington, 587–9 Candaele, Kerry, 421 Capa, Robert, 615 Capela, Alice, 500 capitalism, 178–9, 185–7, 188–9 Carlomusto, Jean, 323 Carman, Curtis, 319 Cartome (website), 607n Cartwright, L., 282 Castiglia, C., 332 Castillo, Carmen, 13, 479, 525–7, 531–5 Castillo, D.A., 234 Castro, Fidel, 433 Catfish (2003), 589 Catholicism, 386, 396–7 Cavell, Stanley, 580, 581 Cazdyn, E., 36 Cazenave, A., 76 CCTV, 560, 581, 582–5, 590–9, 607n–8n censorship, 48, 388, 424n, 503n, 542 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 539, 562–3 CGI (computer generated imagery), 46, 62, 275, 280, 281, 285, 289–95, 615 Chagnon, Napoleon, 617–20, 626n Chaich, John, 327 Chakarova, Mimi, 122n Chang, Helen, 586 Chapkis, W., 192 Chapman, J., 48 Char, René, 514 Charles, Larry, 338 Chase, Chevy, 62, 71 Chatman, S.B., 371 Cheney, Dick, 553 Chermayeff, Maro, 220 Chevron, 32–4

Chiapello, E., 149, 150 Child, Julia, 626n children carers, 113–14, 148, 616 cultural identity, 128–9 and economic migration, 111–14 and HIV/AIDs, 303, 312n, 326 of sex workers, 194 Children of Golzow (1961‒2007), 150 Chile, 13, 479, 488, 525–7, 530–5 Chilingo, Tatu, 226–7 China, 119–21, 344, 345, 346–7 China Blue (2005), 120 Chon, G., 515 Chow, Rey, 424n Christenberry, Thomas C., 611, 625n Christian Right (United States), 338 Chronicle of a Summer (1960), 511 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 539, 562–3 Cinema Effect, The (Cubitt), 568 Cinema Suitcase, 125, 140n Citizen’s Network against Violence (La Red Ciudadana contra la Violencia), 233 Ciudad Juárez (Mexico), 233–49 clam digging, 160–2 clandestine migration, 92–107 Clark, T.J., 164 climate change, 23–6, 43, 47, 48–9, 50–2, 61–80, 81n–2n climateGEM, 74–5, 77, 79 Clinton, Hillary, 222, 230n close-ups, 212–13 Cofán people, 32–4, 36 Cohen, T., 51 Cold War, 438–42 Cole, D., 158 Collas, G., 487 Collier, John, 619 colonialism, 67–8, 98, 134, 501–2 Comandon, Jean, 283 Common Threads (1989), 275–6 communism, 176–8, 384–98 Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), 384–7 Comolli, J.-L., 171, 416, 420, 425n, 605 Compoare, Chantal, 225 composition (images), 155–65

652 Index computer generated imagery (CGI), 46, 62, 275, 280, 281, 285, 289–95, 615 Comrade Duch: The Bookkeeper of Death (2011), 507 Conant Sloane, B., 294 Confucianism, 386, 394 connaissance, definition, 585 Conscience of Nhem En, The (2008), 507 Constable, John, 168 consumer society, 50–2, 351 Contained Mobility (2004), 90–1, 92, 94–7 Control Room (2004), 424n Cook, J., 545 Cooper, Marc, 416 Cooper, Melinda, 278n Cooper, Merian, 345 Cooper, S., 164 Cope, M., 64 Coppola, Francis Ford, 515–16 copy-cat incidents, 624, 626n Córdoba, M.S. Tabuenca see Tabuenca Córdoba, M.S. Corera, G., 538 Corner, G.W., 285, 286 Corner, John, 592 Corrigan, J., 64 Courbet, Gustave, 169 Couzins, Richard, 55 Cowie, Elizabeth, 7, 13, 15, 46, 192, 205, 206, 425n, 426n, 560, 564, 614 Cox, Ana Marie, 406 Craig, Mary, 344 Crenshaw, K., 537 crime, 91, 105, 108–9, 111, 122n crimes against humanity, 7, 408, 506–20, 521n–2n prevention of, 560, 562–4, 590–1, 610–20 war crimes, 408, 486, 548–54, 640–1 critical theory, 411–24, 425n–7n, 462–3, 473n Crni film (1971), 10, 182 cross-cutting, 370, 371, 618, 621 Crude Awakening, A (2006), 28, 30–2, 36–7 Crude: The Real Price of Oil (2009), 28, 30, 32–4, 36, 37–8 Cryptome (website), 607n Csikszentmihalyi, M., 58n Cubilié, A., 239

Cubitt, S., 22, 23, 25, 568–9 culture, 65–7, 71–3, 225–6 drag ball culture, 257–9 and migration, 89–90, 130–3, 141n, 142n mimicry and appropriation, 134–5, 573–4 network culture, 14, 567–78 and religion, 337–8, 384–98 and surveillance, 566–78, 580–606 and work, 121, 165 Cunningham, Michael, 325 Ćurčić, B., 183, 189n Curtis, Adam, 619–20, 626n Curtis, Thomas, 550, 552–3 CV Dazzle (make-up), 643–4 Daily, Gretchen, 51 Dalai Lama, 341, 344–5, 346–7, 348, 349–50 Damisch, Hubert, 133–4, 141n–2n, 158 Daney, Serge, 593–4, 605 Dao Trong Khanh, 387 Daston, L., 281 Davis, Angela, 529–30 Davis, Charles Bruce, 640–1 Davis, Peter, 415 Dawson, Jonathan, 425n Day I Will Never Forget, The (2002), 214, 222–3, 226, 227 Day of the Sparrow, The (2010), 455, 460, 462, 469–71 Day Zero Films, 302 Dayan, C., 537 de Antonio, Emile, 434, 454, 563, 636 de Freitas, S., 58n de la Mora, S., 247, 249n de la Torre, Sergio see Torre, Sergio de la de Peuter, G., 48, 406 de Sousa Dias, Susana see Dias, Susana de Sousa Dear, M., 64 debt bondage, 118–19 Decent Factory, A (2004), 120–1 deconstruction, 418, 426n DeCuir, G., Jr., 183 deep packet inspection (DPI), 561 Delany, Samuel R., 133

Index 653 Deleuze, Gilles, 148, 150, 169, 171, 268n, 473n, 564, 568–9, 571, 574, 582, 583, 586, 595–6, 607n Delgadillo, T., 250n Demos, T.J., 96 Denmark, 114–16 Deren, Maya, 338 Derksen, Reuben, 351 Derrida, Jacques, 142n, 239, 240 Desert Flower (Dirie), 230n Det Andert Europa (2006), 109–10 Development of the Fertilized Rabbit Ovum (1929), 281, 286–9, 291 Dews, Peter, 426n DiagnosisOne, 562 Dias, Susana de Sousa, 7, 11, 12–13, 15, 478, 482–3, 491–502, 503n Dibley, B., 57 Dick, Kirby, 408 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 435, 493, 498, 504n Diederichsen, Diedrich, 450n Digital Coast project, 74–5, 82n digital documentaries, 314–32, 405–8, 569–71, 573–8, 604 Digital Multimedia Evidence Processing Lab, LEVA, 612 Dilawar of Yakubi, 548–53 Dimitrijević, B., 181, 184 DINAS-COAST project, 82n Dinning, Mark, 472n Dirie, Waris, 230n disabled people, and sex, 202–5 disasters, 151 “discourse of sobriety”, 64, 404 District 9 (2009), 47 Dith Pran, 507, 515 Ditmore, M., 192, 205 Djilas, M., 177 Dlamini, Gugu, 303 Dlamini, Lihle, 308 Dlamini-Zuma, Nkosazana, 299 documentaries, definition, 1–2, 11–12, 45, 134, 420, 425n documentary studies, 2–3, 8–17 Donahue, Phil, 408 Dong Xuan Thuyet, 388, 395 Donziger, Steven, 32–4

Dorkenoo, Efua, 228, 231n Dorrington, R., 303 Dorsky, Nathaniel, 339 Double Tide (2010), 160–2, 167, 171, 172n DPI (deep packet inspection), 561 drag ball culture, 252–67 drones, 101–2 Dubos, René, 278n Duch (Kaing Geuk Eav), 480, 486–7, 506, 508, 509–10, 511–14, 518, 521n Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell (2011), 480, 486–7, 503n, 506, 512–14, 518 Duguet, Anne-Marie, 593 Dukhovnye golosa (1995), 339, 466–9, 473n Dumbadze, Nodar, 395 Dunlop, Nic, 508 Duong, Mac, 392 Duray, Dan, 268n Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), 199–201 Dyer-Witheford, N., 22, 48, 406 dystopia, 43–57 Eames, Charles and Ray, 587 Early Works (1969), 180, 182, 186 Earth Day, 21 Eastern Europe, 176–80 Ebert, Roger, 507, 605 eco-politics, 22–6, 43–57 Eco, Umberto, 615 economy free trade agreements, 118–19 globalization, 89, 94, 98–9, 112–14, 117–22 oil prices, 36–8 and politics, 176–89 and trafficking, 106–7, 108–22, 194–5 Ecuador, 28, 32–4, 36 Eder, Joseph Maria, 613 Educating Essex (TV series), 606n edutainment, 9, 16–17, 212–13, 277–8, 280–95, 298–312 military training, 445–9 Egan, R.D., 192 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 349 Eichmann, Adolf, 506 Eisenstein, Sergei, 418, 422–3, 443 Eitzen, D., 317

654 Index El Valley Centro (2000), 155–8, 171 Ell, P.S., 64 Ellerson, Beti, 229n Elliot, Mark, 363n–4n Elliott, L., 147 Elsaesser, Thomas, 413, 418, 450n, 454 Eltit, Merino, 526–7 Elwood, S., 64, 81n emergence, definition, 278n Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 157 emotional geographies, 62–3, 77–80 emotions grief, 241–9, 276, 315–17, 320–32 happiness, 169, 170, 247 and scientific objectivity, 284–5, 286–9, 291–5 empowerment, 16–17 Endemol, 591 Enemies of the People (2009), 506, 514–17, 518, 521n Enfoldment and Infinity (2010), 568–9 Engels, F., 176, 184 England, Lynndie, 529 English, as global language, 128, 135 environment see planet Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2009), 147, 150 epistemology, 63 Epperlein, Petra, 456 Epstein, Robert, 275–6 Equality Now, 224, 225, 227, 228, 230n Erasing David (2009), 566, 567–8, 582–5, 589–90, 634 Erola, Judy, 212 Eshun, Kodwo, 43, 48, 58n essay films, 441–2 essentialism, 540–1 Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, 322 ethics and cultural difference, 71–3, 225–6 data protection and surveillance, 172, 411, 559, 561–5, 620–5, 626n–7n, 629–44 food ethics, 172n moral disengagement, 521n non-intervention, 215, 620–5 and politics, 16–17, 97 relations between subject and film-maker, 10–11, 62, 90, 91, 97, 127–30, 163–4,

194–5, 201, 215, 246–7, 261–7, 342–3, 486–9, 599–600, 617–25 and religion, 339, 342–3 representation of sex work, 193–6, 201 scientific documentaries, 275 and torture, 485–6 traumatic images, 9, 15, 242–9, 408–9, 410–24, 482–502 work ethic, 169–70, 176–8, 205–6 ethnic identity, 128–9, 131, 254, 351–63, 366–80 ethnography, 62, 65–6, 74, 81n, 225–6, 257–60, 345–7, 617–20 Etwas wird sichtbar / Before Your Eyes ‒ Vietnam (1982), 418, 450n Etzersdorfer, Elmar, 624 European Union, 90, 92–7, 98–9, 107n Europlex (2003), 94 Every Step You Take (2007), 590–2 EVOKE (2010), 48 Ewing, Heidi, 338 Exit (2008), 167 extra-textual documentation, 215, 262 “extremely documentary”, 126, 138, 141n extremism, 13 see also fundamentalism Eye/Machine (2000‒2003), 444–5 Fa, Sister, 219, 224, 227 Fabian, J., 62, 131, 139 face blindness, 643–4 face recognition, 590, 629–44 Faceless (2007), 596–9 factory workers, 119–22, 150–1, 170, 182–9 Fainaru, D., 512 Fajardo, Pablo, 32–4 fake documentaries, 339 family relationships, 111–14, 124–5, 136–40 Far from Vietnam (1967), 433, 434 Farbotko, C., 62–3, 69, 81n Farley, M., 196 Farm Animal Drawing Generator (2008), 569–71 Farocki, Harun, 7, 12, 15, 171, 409, 418, 431–49, 450n–1n, 460–1, 471n, 473n, 581, 594–6 Fata Morgana (1971), 338

Index 655 Faubion, James D., 574–5 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 563 Fear of Small Numbers (Appadurai), 414 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 563 Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), 61–80, 81n–2n Feinstein, Howard, 621, 622 Felman, S., 549 Female Circumcision: Human Rights (1998), 230n female genital cutting/mutilation (FGC/M), 9, 213, 214, 217–29, 230n–1n feminicide, 214, 215, 233–49 feminist theory, 9, 10, 16, 195–6, 198, 217–29, 244, 418, 426n, 529–30 Femmes aux yeux ouverts (1994), 229n–30n Fenner, Angelica, 9, 10, 12, 15, 339–40, 363n Ferguson, Charles A., 548 Ferguson, Neil, 590 Ferguson, R. Brian, 619, 626n Fertilization and Development of the Sea Urchin Egg (1907), 275, 282–3 fictionalism, 182 Fielding, Julien, 341 Fill the Void (2012), 369 film industry, 148–9 Fine, Andrea and Sean, 548 Fink, M., 329 Fischer, S., 380n Fisher, Brian, 74 Fisher, L., 148 Fisher, M., 82n Fiske, S.T., 509 Flaca Alejandra, La (1994), 13, 479, 525–7, 530–5 flood.firetree (website), 76, 77–9 Florida Sugar Cane League, 117 Flusser, Vilém, 438 Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman (2007), 363n Fog of War, The (2003), 510 Folks in My Home (1970), 387 Folly, Anne-Laure, 229n–30n Folman, Ari, 517 Fonda, Jane, 426n food ethics, 172n For How We Perceived a Life (2012), 268n

Ford, M., 54 Forgotten Space, The (2011), 451n Forman, Miloš, 178 Fort Chipewyan (Canada), 34–6 fossil fuels see oil Foucault, Michel, 148, 220, 249n, 484, 563–4, 567, 569, 574, 581–3, 585, 589, 594, 630 Foulkrod, Patricia, 408 found footage, 55, 295, 434–5, 442, 450n, 513, 569, 593–9, 600–5, 611–17, 620 Fourie, L., 301 Fowler, C., 215 Fox, Broderick, 324, 325, 326 Fox, Eytan, 371–2 Fox, Jennifer, 343, 351–60, 363n Fra Thailand til Thy / Fra Thy til Thailand (2008), 111, 114–16 framing, 151, 212–13, 308–11, 604–5 “framing out”, 67 perspective, 155–62 Frank, K., 192 Franks, Robert, 615 Fredericks, Grant, 611–12, 613, 614, 625n free trade, 118–19 Freeman, James M., 390 Fregoso, Rosa-Linda, 9, 10, 213, 214, 215, 233–4, 250n Freitas, S. de see de Freitas, S. Freud, Sigmund, 354, 358, 361, 463 Fricke, Ron, 339 Fried, Erich, 433 Friedman, Jeffrey, 275–6 Friedman, Peter, 276 Friend, Tad, 622–3, 624 FRONT404, 593 Frost, S., 158 Fuchs, Christian, 561 Fuentes, Annette, 566–7 Full Body Quotation (2011), 268n Funari, Vicky, 119, 196–9 Fund for Grassroots Activism to End Genital Mutilation, 231n fundamentalism, 338, 366–80 funding, films, 179, 182, 215, 434–5, 442–3, 450n Fusco, Coco, 478, 526, 527–30, 533, 534–5 future, 40–1, 43–57, 360

656 Index Gadaffi, Mohammed see Kadhafi, Muammar Gaines, Jane M., 7, 11, 12, 13, 16, 29, 213, 320, 408–9, 422, 454, 455, 473n, 540 Galison, P., 281 Galloway, Alexander R., 568 Galveias, Maria, 500 Gambale, Maria Luisa, 219 Gamer (2009), 576 games, 47–8, 50, 58n military training, 445–9, 451n Gardner, R., 81n Garrett, Laurie, 276–7, 279n Garrison, Dale, 611, 612 Gatti, Armand, 451n Gawande, A., 294 gay and lesbian studies, 254 Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), 257 Gaza, 135–6, 377 Gelpke, Basil, 28 gender identity, 250n, 264–5, 268n, 371–3, 374–7 genocide, 506–20, 521n–2n genre, definition, 459–60 geographic information systems (GIS), 64–5, 69–80, 81n geography, 14–15 aesthetics, 38–9, 41n, 50–1, 54 emotional geographies, 62–3, 77–80 future geographies, 50–7 geopolitics, 92–107, 225–6 modeling of, 61–80, 81n–2n spatial perception, 67–9 geohumanities, 64 geospatial research, 63–4 Germany, 134–5, 469–71 Gervásio, António, 491, 496–7 Getino, Octavio, 235, 435, 450n Gevald (2008), 369–73 Ghosh, Bishnupriya, 5–6, 321, 323–4 Ghosh, Shohini, 199–201 Ghosts (2006), 110–11 Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007), 524–5 Gibney, Alex, 524, 537–41, 548–54 Gill, R., 196 Ginsberg, Allen, 21 Ginsburg, F., 305

girls, and female genital cutting/mutilation, 9, 213, 214, 217–29, 230n–1n Giroux, H., 49 Give Me My Data (app), 576–7 Glass, Philip, 31 Glawogger, Michael, 166 Gleaners and I, The (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse, 2000), 162–5, 172n Gleaners, The (Millet, 1857), 164 Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS), 58n global languages, 128, 135 Global Safari (Powered by Google) (2010), 587–9 globalism, 22 globalization, 89, 94, 98–9, 112–14, 117–22 GLUB (Hearts, 2004), 129, 134–5 Godard, Jean-Luc, 180, 188, 417, 434 Godmilow, Jill, 449n, 450n, 518, 521n–2n Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 626n Golden Child, The (1986), 349 Golden Gate Bridge, 620–5, 626n–7n Goldsby, Jackie, 259–60 Goldson, Annie, 508 Goldwater, Janet, 224 Gómez-Barris, Macarena, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 478, 479, 526 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 238–9 Goodall, Steve, 61–2, 63, 65–6, 67, 71, 73, 81n, 82n Goodchild, M., 74, 82n Goodhart, B., 542, 544 Goodman, A., 548 Goodman, Y., 380n Google Earth, 69–73, 75, 83n Gordon, Avery, 525, 537 Gore, Al, 61–2, 63, 74, 75 Gorin, Jean-Pierre, 417 Gould, D., 328 Goulding, D.J., 180 Gqaleni, Nceba, 309 Grady, Rachel, 338 Grajeda, Tony, 425n, 458 Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, The (2007), 214, 228 Greenfield, Shoshi, 377–9 Greenwald, Robert, 415, 421

Index 657 Gregory, I.N., 64 Gregory, P.W., 286, 288, 289, 292 Grewal, Inderpal, 217, 220–2, 225, 229n grief, 241–9, 276, 315–17, 320–32 Grierson, John, 192, 317, 341 Griggs, G., 82n Grissom, Brandi, 572–3 Groombridge, B., 305 Grootenboer, H., 159 Ground Truth, The (2006), 408 “Grunt Doc”, 407–8 Gryczałowska, Krystyna, 178 Guatanamo Bay, 13, 536–48, 553–4, 555n Guattari, Felix, 473n Guerin, F., 239 Guggenheim, Davis, 57n, 61–2, 63, 74, 75 Gulati, Sonali, 121 Gulf Wars, 405–6, 444–5 Gunning, Isabelle, 229n Gunning, Tom, 171 Guo, Xiaolu, 148 Gush Emunim, 366 Guzman, Patricio, 235 H-2 Worker (1990), 117–18 H2Oil (2009), 28, 34–6, 37, 38, 39 Ha Noi trong mat ai (1982), 387–8, 389, 392 Haddon, Arthur, 617 Halberstam, J., 372, 373 Half the Sky (Kristof and WuDunn), 220, 230n Hall, Stuart, 614 Halladin, Danuta, 178 Hallas, R., 239 Halliday, George, 601 Halperin, Daniel, 279n Halter, Ed, 406 Hamill, Kerry, 508 Hamill, Rob, 508 Hammer, Barbara, 244 Han Mac Tu, 397 Hanoi in One’s Eyes (1982), 387–8, 389, 392 Hänsgen, Sabine, 467, 468 happiness, 169, 170, 247 Haraway, D., 538 Harding, F., 301 Hardt, M., 30, 40, 41, 149, 155, 165, 192

Haredim, 366, 370–3, 376, 377 Harlan, Thomas, 487 Harley, Karen, 164–5 Harrington, M., 177 Harris, T.M., 64 Harrison, Marguerite, 345 Harvey, Adam, 643–4 Harvey, D., 186 Harvey, Sylvia, 425n Hatoum, Mona, 132 Hau’ofa, E., 67–8, 70, 73 Hauser, A., 169 Haux, R., 281 health documentaries, 212–13, 277–8, 298–312 health and safety issues, 111, 120, 151–2, 166 Heartfield, John, 443 Hearts (GLUB, 2004), 129, 134–5 Hearts and Minds (1974), 415, 416 Heilbuth, Poul-Erik, 109–10 Heise, U.K., 4, 21–2, 23 Hendee, W.R., 294 Henley, Paul, 617 Heredia, Paula, 225, 231n Hernández-Navarro, Miguel Á., 141n Herzog, Werner, 6, 151, 338, 345 Hesford, Wendy, 220, 231n, 540, 541 Hess, John, 626n Hess, Karen, 626n Hetherington, K., 250n Hetherington, Tim, 456, 472n Heynowski, Walter, 434 Hicks, Jeremy, 466 Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance (Shell), 642–3 Hier, Sean, 567 Higson, Andrew, 166 Hill, Annette, 617 Hill, Gary, 599–600 Hinton, A.L., 521n historicity, 11–14, 600–5 Hitchcock, Victress, 346 HIV/AIDS, 275–8, 279n, 298–312, 314–32 activists, 10–11, 256–7, 262, 275–6, 277, 300–12 Ho Chi Minh, 385, 393

658 Index Ho Tri Pho, 388 Hoang Van Hoan, 397–8 Höch, Hannah, 443 Hodes, Rebecca, 8–9, 11, 15, 16, 277–8, 308 Hohendahl, Peter, 438 Holcomb, Mark, 457 Holliday, George, 601, 613, 614, 615, 616–17 Holm, T.N., 308 Holocaust (Shoah), 488–9, 503n, 510, 511, 519, 626n Home (2009), 23 home video, 141n homeless, 181, 182 “homo sacer”, 546 homophobia, 372–3 hooks, bell, 257–8, 269n Hosken, Fran, 219, 221 Hotchkiss, Sarah, 464 Hour of the Furnaces, The (1968), 235 How Good to See You Alive (1989), 488 How the Steel Was Tempered (1988), 181 How to Disappear (Ahearn), 634 How to Remove a Police Helmet (1969), 432 Howard, John, 606n Howe, Daniel C., 633 Hoya Productions, 302 Hubbard, Jim, 322, 327–8 Huerta, M., 281 Hugo, Victor, 477, 484 human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), 275–8, 279n, 298–312, 314–32 activists, 10–11, 256–7, 262, 275–6, 277, 300–12 “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual ‒ 1983” (CIA), 539 human rights, 29, 94, 118–19, 346–7, 484–6, 538, 540–1, 562–3 war crimes, 408, 486, 548–54, 601–5 women’s rights, 222, 225–6, 228–9, 230n, 233–49 human trafficking, 14, 89, 91, 106–7, 108–22 Hun Sen, 509 Hungarian cinema, 178 Hurt Locker, The (2008), 472n Hurwitz, Leo, 419 Hutcheon, L., 370, 371

I Only Wish That I Could Weep (2001‒2002), 462, 464–6 I.-R.A.S.C., 642 I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (2000), 451n, 594–6 ID cards, 630–1 identity activist identities, 16–17 and fundamentalism, 380n gender identity, 11, 250n, 529–30 and language, 128, 135 migrants and refugees, 97, 100–1, 130–3, 137–9, 141n, 142n mixed identities, 128–9, 131, 351–63 national identity, 394–5 race and ethnic identity, 128–9, 131, 252–67, 268n–9n, 351–63, 366–80 sex workers, 192, 201 sexual identity, 254, 256–7, 369–73 and voice, 139–40, 637, 640–1, 645n Ignatieff, Michael, 412–14, 424n illegal migration, 92–107, 571–3 images CGI, 46, 62, 63, 275, 280, 281, 285, 289–95, 615 found footage, 55, 295, 434–5, 442, 450n, 513, 569, 593–9, 600–5, 611–17, 620 historicity, 11–14, 600–5 memorials, 243, 245, 246–7, 326–7, 328–9, 331–2, 511, 549–53 montage, 54, 394, 431–49, 496–9, 517, 542–3 sex workers, 193–6, 201 torture, 9, 242–4, 478–80, 482–502, 511, 521n–2n, 527–35, 536–54, 603–5 war, 15, 408–9, 410–24, 431–49, 462–71 Images from the Secret STASI Archives (n.d.), 586 Images of the World (1989), 418, 435, 438–42, 460–1 immaterial labour, 12, 114–15, 116, 148, 150, 155, 156, 162–3, 165, 171–2, 191–206 imperialism, 221, 269n, 417, 421, 433–4, 526, 529, 530, 539, 568 impressionism, 167–8, 169, 173n Imre, Anikó, 4, 10, 14 In the Year of the Pig (1969), 434 In This World (2002), 543–4

Index 659 Inconvenient Truth, An (2006), 50, 57n, 61–2, 63, 64, 74–9, 80 indexicality, 45–6, 171–2, 348–9, 404, 420, 427n, 540, 543–5, 604–5, 616–17 India, 121, 277, 279n, 323–4 sex workers, 191, 194, 199–201 Indiewire, 517 indigenous peoples, rights, 32–4, 103–5, 346–7 inequality, 147–50 Inextinguishable Fire (1969), 434–8, 447, 449n information-gathering, and electronic surveillance, 561–3 Inner Life of the Cell, The (2006), 275, 280, 281, 285, 289–95 Inside the FBI (2003), 563 installations, 133, 443–5 Institute for the Future, 48 Institute for Unstable Media, 58n interactivity, 64, 74–5, 79, 82n–3n, 307, 326–7, 328–9, 332, 406, 577–8, 608n, 645n intercultural analysis, 134 intercultural friendships, 135–6, 139–40 interdisciplinarity, 25, 64, 136–40, 142n, 633 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 76 intermediality, 136, 139 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 118–19 International Planned Parenthood Federation, 219 Internet surveillance, 561–4, 567–8, 569–78, 633 intertextuality, 215, 372, 393, 394–5, 398, 528, 618–19 intertitles, 286–7, 288, 432, 438, 546 Intifada, 367–80 Into Eternity (2010), 43, 52–4, 57n–8n Inventur ‒ Metzstrasse 11 (Inventory, 1975), 181–2 Invisible War, The (2012), 408 Iraq for Sale (2006), 415, 421 Iraq war, 151, 405, 406–7, 410–24, 425n, 426n, 445–9, 456–9, 503n, 524–5, 529–30, 545, 608n Islamic art, 574–5 Islamism, 414, 540–1, 626n

Israeli documentaries, 13, 14, 340, 366–80, 381n–2n, 640–1 IT studies, 424n Ivanovsky, Dmitri, 278n Ivens, Joris, 338, 419 Jackson, Laura F., 228 Jackson, Lisa F., 214 Jakobsen, Roman, 361 Jamaica, 118–19 James, Scott, 623 Jameson, F., 29, 47, 158 Jardim, João, 164–5 Jay, Martin, 412 Jenkins, David, 457, 472n Joffé, Roland, 507 John & Jane (2005), 121 Johnson, L., 298, 299 Johnson, Lyndon B., 602 Johnston, Claire, 418 Jones, Eugene, 472n Jones, William E., 569, 572 Joost, Henry, 589 Joslin, Tom, 276 Jovanović, Branimir, 188, 189n Judaism, 339, 340, 366–80 Juhasz, Alexandra, 6, 10–11, 15, 276, 339, 418 Jung, Carl, 356 Junge, Winfried, 150 Junger, Sebastian, 456, 472n Kadhafi, Muammar, 102 Kahana, Jonathan, 608n, 636 Kaing Geuk Eav see Duch (Kaing Geuk Eav) Kamieńska, Irena, 178 Kang, Laura Hyun Yi, 5 Kant, I., 39 Kantor, Alfred, 439, 440 Kaplan, Caren, 220–2, 225, 229n Kara, Siddharth, 116 Karmen, Roman, 387 Karpinski, Janis, 603 Kauffman, Ross, 194 Keen, Andrew, 575–6 Keller, E., 82n Kempadoo, Kemala, 109

660 Index Kempinski (2007), 47 Kennedy, Heather, 35 Kennedy, John F., 600–1 Kennedy, Rory, 480n, 524 Kennicott, P., 542 Kercher, Meredith, 560 Kerr, Ted, 333n Kerslake, P., 47, 49 Kessler, Frank, 571 Khensur Rinpoche, 350 Khieu Samphan, 509, 510, 519, 520n Khmer Rouge, 479, 487, 506–20, 521n–2n Khuong Me, 385 Kideckel, D.A., 182–3 Kill Team (2013), 408 Killing Fields, The (1984), 507 King, H., 164 King, Noel, 426n King, Rodney, 564, 601, 613, 614, 615, 616–17, 625n, 626n Kirn, Gal, 179 Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 330 Kittler, Friedrich, 431, 438 Klazinga, Larissa, 300 Klein, Bonnie Sherr, 193–4 Klein, Jim, 418 Klein, Melanie, 358 Klein, Naomi, 526 Kleinhans, Chuck, 426n Kleinman, A., 511 Kleinman, J., 511 knowledge, definitions, 585–6 Knox, Amanda, 560 Koch, Ulrike, 345 Köcher, Norbert, 637 Kohl, Helmut, 486 Kolkata, 194, 199–201 Konchog, Geshe Lama, 350 Koskela, Hille, 573 Kovel, J., 52 Kracauer, Siegfried, 416, 419 Kramer, Robert, 454, 487 Krasnoff, Miguel, 533 Krauss, Dan, 408 Krauss, Rosalind, 462–3 Kristof, Nicholas, 220 “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation ‒ July 1963” (CIA), 539

Kundun (1997), 344, 349 Kwanda (TV series), 312n Kyoto Protocol (1997), 83n La Red Ciudadana contra la Violencia (Citizen’s Network against Violence), 233 Lago Agro oilfield (Ecuador), 32–4 Lai Van Sinh, 389 Laird, Thomas, 344 Lamb, Jim, 276, 315–16 Lambert, Olly, 472n Lamotrek, 71–2 Landau, Saul, 488 Landecker, H., 282, 283, 285, 289 landscape painting, 155, 156, 157–8, 167, 168–70 Lane, Diane, 230n Lange, Oskar, 177 languages, and globalization, 128, 135 Lanier, Jaron, 172 Lanzmann, Claude, 478, 479–80, 487, 488, 504n, 510, 511 Last Address (2010), 325–6 Last Angel of History, The (1997), 48, 58n Latinos/Latinas, 252–67, 268n–9n Latour, B., 171 Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Video Association (LEVA), 612 Lazzarato, M., 170, 192 Le Duan, 386, 387 Leaves Fall in All Seasons (2013), 151–2 Lebow, Alisa, 6, 7, 12, 15, 127, 256, 259, 337, 405, 407, 409 Lederberg, Joshua, 276 Lefebvre, Henri, 427n Lefebvre, M., 156 Lefsrud, L., 37 Left Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionario, MIR), 526, 535n left-wing documentaries, 368, 369, 373–7, 410–24, 425n, 426n, 539–41 Leigh, Carol (Scarlet Harlot), 195 Leijon, Anna-Greta, 637 Leitner, Nino, 590–2 Lektionen in Finsternis (1992), 151, 338 Lemkin, Rafael, 514, 521n

Index 661 Lemkin, Rob, 506, 514–18, 519–20, 521n Lenin, V.I., 177 Lerner, Jesse, 339 Lerner, Yehuda, 478 Lesage, Julia, 212–13, 548 Lessons of Darkness (1992), 151, 338 Letter to Jane (1972), 417, 425n, 473n Level 5 (1997), 48 Levi, P., 179, 626n Levinas, Emmanuel, 339, 636 Levine, S., 302 Levinson, M., 69 Lewis, Warren H., 280, 285–9, 290, 292 Libya, 102–3 Liebler, John, 290–1, 293 Liebling, A.J., 625 Life and Debt (2001), 118 Light, Allie, 212 Limit Telephotography (n.d.), 587 Lin, Ai Qin, 110–11 Lindquist, J., 194–5 linear perspective, 155–62 Linge, J.P., 281 Lippit, A., 547 Literat, I., 329, 331 Little Buddha (1993), 344, 349–50 Little Pioneers (1968), 181 Live Nude Girls Unite! (2000), 191, 196–9, 205 Living in Truth (Havel), 386 Livingston, Jenny, 211, 252, 253, 254, 256–60, 262, 263, 265, 266–7 Lockdown High (Fuentes), 566–7 Lockhart, Sharon, 160–2, 167, 168–9, 172n Loin du Vietnam (1967), 433, 434 Lon Nol, 508 Longinotto, Kim, 215, 222–3, 228, 230n Lopez, A., 320 Lorre, Peter, 438 Lost in Space (2005), 128, 135, 139–40, 142n Lothar, Eli, 173n Lourenço, E., 484, 503 Love on Delivery (2008), 111, 114–16 Lovelock, J., 51 Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael, 645n–6n Lue, Robert A., 290 Lukács, G., 425n Lukács, J., 177, 178 Luksch, Manu, 596–9, 608n

Lumière brothers, 171, 338 Lunch Break (2008), 167 Lünen, A. von see von Lünen, A. Lusty Lady club (San Francisco), 196–9 Lutens, Serge, 439 Lutz, C., 539 Lynas, Mark, 63, 81n Lynden, J., 380 Lyon, David, 562, 581, 607n, 630, 631 Lyons, C., 548 Maas, Peter, 411 Maben, Adrian, 508 MacCabe, Colin, 425n MacCannell, D., 81n MacDonald, Dale, 332n MacDougall, David, 620 MacDougall, Melinda, 634 MacInnis, Mark, 165 Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Las (1986), 242 Madsen, Michael, 43, 53–4, 57n–8n Magagnoli, Paolo, 465 Mahanjane, Amós, 502–3 Mahmood, S., 367 Mai Loc, 385 mail order brides, 114–16 Maizière, Thomas de, 641 Majoro, Trevor, 309 Makavejev, Dušan, 179, 180 make-up, 643–4 Making of Buddhist Modernism, The (McMahan), 344 Malitsky, J., 282 Mallal, Samir, 121 Mamdani, M., 540–1 Mandelbrot, B., 74 Mann, Steve, 560, 601, 633–4 Mansfield 1962 (2006), 569 mapping, 14, 74–80 Mapping CCTV in Whitehall (2008), 597, 608n Maputo Protocol (2005), 229n Maquilapolis: City of Factories (2006), 119 Marchant, B., 291 Marder, Michael, 172n Mardi Gras: Made in China (2006), 119–20 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 282, 283 Marker, Chris, 48, 391

662 Index Marks, Laura, 244, 551, 574, 575 Marquez, Renata, 587–9 Marr, David, 392 marriage, 114–16, 137–8 Marroquin, Marianna, 260, 261 Marshall, Mike, 167–8 Marshall, Stuart, 275 Martens, Renzo, 147 Martin, Aaron K., 633 Martin, E., 292 Marty, Martin, 380n Marx, Gary T., 561, 632, 633, 634 Marx, K., 151, 176, 181, 184, 188, 393–4 Marx, Laura, 568–9 Marxism, 176, 177, 178 Marxist/Leninist theory, 419 masking, 638–43 Massey, D., 64, 70 Mater, Ahmed, 151, 152 material labour, 155–72 Mathiesen, Thomas, 592 Matos, Conceição, 482, 491, 496 Mayaphi, Simnikiwe, 309 Mazierska, Ewa, 10, 14, 150 Mbeki, Thabo, 307 Mbembe, A., 541 Mboa, Matias, 502 McCormack, Ray, 28 McCoy, Shane, 547 McGann, Rob, 345–6 McGarry, E., 170 McGonigal, Jane, 48, 50, 58n McGregor, H.V., 63 McLagan, M., 29 McLane, J., 376 McMahan, David, 344 McNamara, Robert S., 510, 514, 601–3 McRuer, Robert, 329 McVeigh, Tracy, 613 Measures of Distance (1988), 132 media ethical issues, 622–3, 632 and public opinion, 100, 276–7, 279n and war reporting, 403–9, 410–24, 427n, 539, 546 medical imaging, 293–4 meditation, 339 Medvedkin, Aleksandr, 188

Meins, Holger, 449n Melching, Molly, 230n memorials, 243, 245, 246–7, 326–7, 328–9, 331–2, 511, 549–53 men sexual health, 212 sexual identity, 257–9, 371–3, 381n Mena, Osvaldo Romo, 533–4 Menkes, Nina, 486–7 Menner, Simon, 586, 606n Merino, Marcia Alejandra, 13, 479, 525–7, 530–5 Merleau-Ponty, M., 376 metonymy, 393, 397–8 Mettler, Peter, 41n Metz, Janus, 111, 114–16 Metz, M., 46 Meunier, Jean-Pierre, 343 Mexico, 213, 214, 215, 233–49 Meyer, Eve, 626n Meyer, R., 37 micro-cinematography, 274–5, 280–9 Microgravity Interdisciplinary Research, 58n Micronesia, 61–80, 81n–2n migration, 4, 89–140, 224 and climate change, 67, 77–80, 81n definition, 131 economic migration, 94–5, 98–9, 108–22, 155–6, 178, 179, 181–2 illegal and clandestine migration, 92–107, 571–3 migratory culture, 89–90, 130–3, 141n, 142n separation of families, 111–14, 124–5, 136–40 trafficking, 14, 89, 91, 106–7, 108–22, 194–5 migratory documentary aesthetics, 8, 130–40 Mille et un jours (2004), 125–8, 131 Miller, J., 81n Miller, P., 542 Millet, Jean-François, 157, 164, 169, 170 Milner, A., 47 Mimoune (2006), 132–3 Minority Report (2002), 584 Mirabai Films, 277 Miraculous Beginnings, 462, 464 Mire, Soraya, 230n

Index 663 Mirzoeff, N., 172, 530 Mitchell, R., 292 Mitchell, T., 41 Mitchell, W.J.T., 157–8 mixed identities, 128–9, 131, 351–63 mockumentary, 121 modalities of desire, 45 modernism, 287–8, 289, 295, 344, 418, 425n, 426n, 519, 540–1 Mograbi, Avi, 640–1 Mogulescu, Miles, 418 Mohammed, Faiza Jama, 225 Mohanty, Chandra, 219 Moll, Joana, 573, 574 Monani, S., 29 Monárrez Fragoso, J.E., 234 Monbiot, G., 52 monoculturalism, 380 Monsters (2010), 47 montage, 54, 394, 431–49, 496–9, 517, 542–3 Moore, Michael, 470, 548, 584 Mora, S. de la see de la Mora, S. Morag, Raya, 9, 13, 14–15, 340, 480n Moran, James M., 141n Morecambe Bay disaster (2004), 110–11 Morel, Pierre, 108 Morin, E., 22, 23, 24, 43, 511 Morocco, 101–2 Morretti, Nanni, 185 Morris, Errol, 406, 480n, 489–90, 510, 514, 524, 560, 601–5, 608n Morris, N., 544 Morrison, Norman, 436 Morrisroe, Mark, 319 Morson, Gary Saul, 459, 461 Mortimer, L., 180 Moschek, Wolfgang, 64 mothers, 111–14, 124–5, 136–40, 242, 245, 250n Mothibi, Eula, 308–9 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 542 Mouffe, Chantal, 139 Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionario (MIR), 526, 535n Moylan, T., 52 Mr. Hoover and I (1989), 563

Mrs Goundo’s Daughter (2009), 224 Muir, Lorna, 584–5, 589–90 Mukpo, Gesar, 350–1 Müller, Heiner, 438 multiculturalism, 379–80 Mulvey, L., 170, 358 Mundy, Owen, 576–8 Muniz, Vik, 164 Muñoz, José Esteban, 267n–8n, 528, 530 Murat, Lúcia, 488 Muredda, Angelo, 269n Musante, Joan, 212 Musser, Charles, 422 Muybridge, Eadward, 212 My Country, My Country (2006), 410, 421 My Reincarnation (2011), 351–63 Mydans, S., 519 Myerscough, Paul, 170 Naficy, Hamid, 132, 139 Nair, Mira, 279n Nakoula, Nakoula Basseley, 423 Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night (2005), 121 Namkhai, Khyentse Yeshi see Silvano, Khyentse Yeshi Nanney, Chuck, 319 Napalm, 434–8, 450n Narboni, Jean, 416, 425n narrative, 261, 262–4, 374–5, 390–8, 519, 530–4, 539, 542–3, 549, 597–9, 611–25, 637 cross-cutting, 370, 371, 618, 621 non-linear narratives, 90–1, 360–3, 493–6 Nash, Michael, 81n Nath, Anjali, 7, 9, 12, 13, 478 Nathan, Debbie, 237 National Geographic, 563, 625n national identity, 394–5 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 74–5, 82n Natsios, Deborah, 607n Nattrass, N., 300, 307 Natureza Morta (2005), 482–3 Nauman, Bruce, 593 Navarro, V., 329–30 Negri, A., 149, 155, 165, 186, 192 neoliberalism, 188–9, 220 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 366, 369

664 Index network culture, 14, 567–78 Neuwirth, Jessica, 225 Neveldine, Mark, 576 Never Like the First Time (2006), 636–7, 638 Neville, S., 148 New Masculinities (exhibition, 2005), 126 new technology, 11, 12, 15–17 CGI, 46, 62, 63, 275, 280, 281, 285, 289–95, 615 digital documentaries, 314–32, 405–8, 569–71, 573–8 geographic information systems (GIS), 64–5, 69–80, 81n micro-cinematography, 274–5, 280–9 social media, 423, 424n, 575–7 surveillance, 101–2, 403–4, 559–63, 581, 582–5, 590–9, 600–5, 607n–8n, 630–2 virtual reality (VR), 445–9, 451n weapons and military technology, 403–4, 434–8 New York Times Magazine, 411–12, 415 New Zionism, 367–9, 377–9, 381n Newsreel Collective, 454 Nezaposleni ljudi (1968), 180 Nguyen Khai, 388–9, 393 Nguyen Phu Trong, 398 Nguyen Van Linh, 386–7, 389 Nguyen Vinh Phuc, 388 Nhlapo, Sipho, 305 Nhũng ngu’òi dân quê tôi (1970), 387 Nicholls, R.J., 76 Nichols, B., 49, 64, 68, 149, 227, 230n, 255, 266, 268n, 283–5, 286, 287–8, 292, 295, 342, 404, 418, 426n, 427n, 489–90, 540, 544, 613, 614, 615, 626n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 337, 574, 585, 607n Night Cleaners, The (1975), 418 Nilges, M., 281 Niney, F., 487 Nissenbaum, Helen, 633 Noah, T., 170 Nochlin, L., 164 Nolan, Christopher, 569, 575 Nolan, Jason, 560, 633–4 Noland, William, 600 nomads, 103–5 non-linear narratives, 90–1, 360–3, 493–6 Norbu, Chögyal Namkhai, 351–60

Norman, Daniel, 177 Nornes, Abé Mark, 425n Norodom Sihanouk, Prince, 508 Not a Love Story: A Motion Picture about Pornography (1981), 193–4 Nothing is Missing (2006‒2010), 124–5, 128, 136–40, 142n Noujaim, Jehane, 424n Novaro, María, 239 nuclear industry, 52–4 Nunn, H., 305, 306 Nuon Chea (Brother Number Two), 506, 509, 514–18, 521n Oath, The (2010), 410 objectification, 193–6, 377, 493, 589 objectivity, 284–5, 286–9, 291–5, 607n Occupy protest (2012), 159–60 Oceania, 67–9 Ochoa, Digna, 235 O’Connor, John, 35 Odell, Jonas, 636–9 Öğüt, Ahmet, 159–60 O’Hehir, Andrew, 457, 472n oil, 14, 24, 26, 28–41, 106–7, 151 Oishi, Eve, 3, 9, 12, 213, 214, 215 Okazaki, Steven, 508 Old School Capitalism (2009), 150–1, 182–9 Olds, Ian, 456 Oliver, K., 240 O’Neill, Matthew, 423 Onkalo (Finland), 53–4 Ono, Yoko, 528 Onomy Labs, 326–7 Operation Atropos (2005), 526, 527–30, 533, 534–5 Oppenheimer, G.M., 307 Oppenheimer, Joshua, 486–7 Optical Media (Kittler), 431 optical unconscious, 462–3, 468–9, 470–1 Oracles and Demons of Ladakh (2003), 345–6 Orwell, George, 630 Osborne, L., 151 Oscar, William, Sam (2012), 159–60 O’Shaughnessy, M., 171 Ostherr, Kirsten, 11, 12, 13, 15, 274–5, 286 Otan erthei mama gia ta Hristougenna (1996), 111–14, 117

Index 665 “other”, 9, 10–11, 62 Other Europe, The (2006), 109–10 Other Night Sky, The (n.d.), 587 Otolith Group, 58n Otolith trilogy (2003‒2009), 43, 55–6, 58n Pacific Islands, 24–5 Pack, Brent, 603–5, 608n Paglen, Trevor, 12, 537, 586–7 pain, images of, 9, 169–70, 239–40, 242–9, 511, 521n–2n, 528 see also torture Painlevé, Jean, 282 paintings, 155, 156, 157–8, 167, 168–70 Palestinian-Israeli conflict, 135–6, 142n, 366–80, 381n–2n, 640–1 pandemics, 276–7, 279n, 298–312, 323–4 Panh, Rithy, 10, 479, 486–7, 503n, 506–7, 510, 511–14, 518, 519–20, 521n, 545 panopticommodity, definition, 607n Panopticon, 563–4, 567–73, 578n, 581–2, 606n panoptICONS (2010), 593 Panse, Silke, 5, 9, 150, 151, 157 paramilitarist documentary, 455–60, 472n Parciack, R., 366 Paris Is Burning (1990), 213, 214–15, 252, 253, 255, 256–60, 262, 263, 265, 266–7, 268n Park, Y., 81n Parker, W., 300 Parks, L., 70–1, 82n Parmar, Pratibha, 219, 221–2, 230n Parnet, C., 169 parodies, 370–3 past, visualization of, 11–14, 15, 315–32, 491–502 Patel, Mukul, 597 Pateman, C., 195–6 Patten, Lesley Ann, 350 Patterson, James, 560 Pattison, P., 147 Paveyio, Agnes, 224 Pavlović, Živojin, 179 Payne, Paul, 624 Pedersen, Janus Metz, 456, 472n Pedro, Manuel, 491, 494, 495, 496 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 348, 427n, 614, 615, 616, 626n Peled, Micha X., 120

Peller, G., 537 People with Disability Australia, 203–4 Peosay, Tom, 345 performativity, 90, 128–9, 134–40, 142n, 259–60, 511, 528 Performing the Border (1999), 94 Pernick, M.S., 212 perspective, 155–62 Petroecuador, 33–4 Peuter, G. de see de Peuter, G. Pferreman, N., 521n Phan boi (1979), 387 Phan Cu De, 397 Phantom Documentary ‒ Disease Surveillance System (2009), 562 Phéline, C., 492 Phillips, H., 299 Photoshop (computer program), 615, 625n Pill, Jeffrey, 345 Pilots in Pyjamas (1968), 434 Pimentel, I.F., 492 Pioniri maleni mi smo vojska prava… (1968), 181 Pissarro, Camille, 167, 173n Pixelhead (n.d.), 641–2 planet, 4, 11, 21–80 biodiversity, 51, 52–4 climate change, 23–6, 43, 47, 48–9, 50–2, 61–80, 81n–2n future of, 40–1, 43–57 nuclear industry, 52–4 oil industry, 14, 24, 26, 28–41 planetarity, 22–6 recycling, 162, 163, 164–5 Planet, The (2006), 26, 43, 50–2, 57n Plasticni Isus (Plastic Jesus, 1971), 188 Plato, 489 poetics, 233–49 Poitras, Laura, 410–11, 421 Pol Pot, 508–9 Polish cinema, 178 politics, 15–17, 458, 472n anarchism, 185 border controls, 93–107, 135–6 colonialism, 67–8, 98, 134, 501–2 communism, 176–8 eco-politics, 22–6, 43–57 and ethics, 16–17, 97

666 Index politics (Cont’d) imperialism, 221, 269n, 417, 421, 433–4, 526, 529, 530, 539, 568 migrants and refugees, 4, 77–80, 81n, 91, 92–107 and oil, 14, 24, 26, 28–41 post-colonialism, 55, 100 post-socialism, 176–89 and public health, 307–11, 562 radicalism and social justice, 410–24, 425n, 426n, 539–41 and religion, 338, 340, 346–7, 366–70, 379–80, 381n, 384–98, 414, 540–1 rights of indigenous peoples, 32–4, 103–5, 346–7 violent protests, 411–14, 421–2, 423, 626n poor, depiction of, 168–70, 173n Poremba, C., 48 pornography, 193–4, 249n Portelli, S., 485 Porter, Edwin S., 288 Porter, Henry, 590 Portillo, Lourdes, 9, 215, 233–49, 250n Portugal, 482–4, 491–502, 503n positivism, 254 post-9/11 documentaries, 524–5, 527–30 post-colonialism, 55, 100 post-documentary, 592 post-industrial sex workers, 202–5 post-socialism, 176–89 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 446–7 postmodernism, 254 Power, N., 55, 56 power relationships, 12–14, 98–9 Powers of Ten (1968 and 1977), 587 Prasad, Anshuman, 633 Prasad, Pushkala, 633 Pratt, A., 196 Press Association, 148 Preston, R., 170 Price of Sex, The (2011), 122n Prism Splits Light, A (2011), 167–8, 171 prisons, design of, 563–4, 567–73, 578n, 581–2, 606n privacy, 563–4 prosopagnosia, 643–4 protagonists, 10–11, 62, 90, 91, 97, 127–30, 155–72, 194–5, 246–7, 261–7, 293,

342–3, 374–7, 486–9, 536–54, 589–90, 599–600, 617–25 anonymity, 629–44 psycho-analysis, 136–8 psychotherapy, 446–7 PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), 446–7 Public and Commercial Services Union, 148 public health policy, 307–8, 562 Puluwat, 61–3, 65–9, 71–4 Pulver, A., 148 Pumzi (2010), 47 Purity (2002), 374 Que bom te ver viva (1989), 488 queer documentary, 213, 214–15, 252–67, 268n–9n, 369–73, 569 queer theory, 254 Query, Julia, 196–9 “Quilty” (AIDS Quilt Touch Project), 326–7, 328–9, 331 Raad, Walid, 461, 462, 463–6, 473n Raatior, V., 67, 71–2, 73, 79–80 Rabin, Yitzhak, 366, 367, 381n Rabinow, P., 46 Rabinowitz, P., 192 race, 252–67, 268n–9n radical documentary, 410–24, 425n, 426n, 539–41 Rafsky, Bob, 328 Rainbo, 230n Rancière, Jacques, 151, 461, 462, 471, 488–9, 499, 503, 585–6, 605 Rangan, Pooja, 231n Rani radovi (1969), 180, 182, 186 Rank, Otto, 358 Rankoane, P., 302 rape, 213, 214, 228, 408 Rastegar, Roya, 261, 263 Ravitsky, A., 380n Ray, Satyajit, 55 reading, vs. shading, 259–60 Reagan, Ronald, 486 realism, 12, 150–1, 164, 165–72, 173n, 252–67, 283–5, 286–9, 291–5, 349, 417–20, 421–3, 425n–7n, 521n–2n reality television, 305–12, 363n, 581, 591–2

Index 667 realness, definition, 259, 349 RealTime, 597–9 Rebellious Son, The (2009), 377–9, 381n–2n recycling, 162, 163, 164–5 Redfearn, Jennifer, 81n, 82n Redmon, David, 119–20 Reed, C., 332 referential theory, 11–14 reflexivity, 134, 163, 181–2, 198, 258–9, 266–7, 314–15, 346, 371, 375, 390–2, 394, 398, 498, 532, 564, 640–1 Reichart, Julia, 418 Reid-Pharr, Robert E., 254 reincarnation, 12, 346–63 Reinhardt, Mark, 141n religion, 6, 337–98 Buddhism, 9, 12, 341–63, 386, 398 Catholicism, 386, 396–7 Confucianism, 386, 394 Islam, 414, 540–1 Judaism, 339, 340, 366–80 and politics, 339, 340, 366–70, 379–80, 381n, 384–98, 414, 540–1 spiritualism, 339 symbolism, 246–7, 338–9, 395–8 and women, 346, 367 Renee, Norman, 330 Renov, M., 45, 48, 68, 109, 338, 378, 379, 391, 454 representation, definition, 268n, 411 Representing Reality (Nichols), 254 Republic (Plato), 489 Resnais, Alain, 569, 571, 575, 577 Restrepo (2010), 457–9, 472n Reuter, Hermann, 309–11 Rich, B.R., 164, 193, 252 Ricoeur, P., 487 Ries, Julius, 275, 282–3 Riggs, Marlon, 418 right-wing documentaries, 377–9 Riley, S., 376 Ritchie, Michael, 349 Rivera, Alex, 121, 122n Road to Guatanamo (2006), 13, 537–48, 553–4 Robbins, Richard, 548 Robinson, K.S., 47

Rocha, Glauber de Andrade, 235 Rodowick, David, 426n Roe, A.H., 46, 645n Rogers, B., 55–6 Rogosin, Lionel, 620 Roman, David, 330 romanticism, 168 Rose, N., 294–5 Rosen, Philip, 427n Rosenberg, C., 547 Rosenstone, R., 493 Rossellini, Roberto, 595 Rouch, Jean, 338, 511, 619 Rouillé, A., 492 Royal S. Marks Collection (New York Public Library), 322, 327 Rubbo, Mike, 415 Rumsey, A.S., 64, 81n Rumsfeld, Donald H., 546 Ryan, M.-L., 318 S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), 479, 486, 507, 511–12 Sabido, Miguel, 301 Sachs, Ira, 325–6 Sachs, W., 22 Sad Song of Yellow Skin, The (1970), 415, 416 Sagar, Anjalika, 43, 58n Sahara Chronicle (2006‒2009), 90–1, 92, 97, 98–106 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 494 Salazar, Juan Francisco, 4, 15, 16–17, 25–6 Saloul, Ihab, 142n Saltmen of Tibet, The (1997), 345 salvage ethnography, 66, 345–7 Samanta, Shakti, 206n Sambath Thet, 10, 506–7, 510, 511, 514–18, 521n Samsara (2011), 339, 507 San Francisco, 620–5, 626n–7n Sander, Liza, 641 Sandu, Sukhdev, 457, 472n Santa Barbara (CA), 79, 80, 83n Santos, Heliodoro, 573, 574 Sarabah (2011), 219, 224 Sarin, Ritu, 350 Savinar, Matthew David, 31

668 Index savoir, definition, 585–6 scalar aesthetics, 38–9, 41n, 50–1, 54 Scarlet Harlot (Carol Leigh), 195 Scarlet Road (2011), 191, 202–5 Scarry, E., 376 Schäfer, Mirko Tobias, 571 Schanberg, Sydney, 507, 515 Schechter, Danny, 427n Scheffner, Philip, 455, 460, 462, 469–70 Schengen Agreement, 90, 94–5, 98–9, 107n Scheumann, Gerhard, 434 Schneeman, Carole, 244 Schneider, N., 367 Schnittstelle (1995), 443, 444–5 Schoedsack, Ernest, 345 Schoendoerffer, Pierre, 415, 472n Schöny, Roland, 581, 593 Schulman, Ariel, 589 science fiction, 44, 47–8, 55–6, 121, 576, 584, 597–9 Scitex (computer program), 615, 625n Scorsese, Martin, 344, 349, 569 Scott, A.O., 457, 458 Scott, Catherine, 202–5 Scott, Garrett, 456 Scott, L., 172 Scranton, Deborah, 415 Screen, 419 sea levels, 24–5, 61–80, 81n–2n Secrets and Lies (2009), 641 Secure Smart Camera (SSC), 631–2 segregated buses, 373–7, 380, 381n Sekula, Allan, 451n self-criticism, 387, 391, 393, 394, 397–8 self-employment, 148, 202 Self-Health (1974), 212–13 self-mutilation, 376 self-representation, 127–9, 253, 255, 260–6, 314–32 self-surveillance, 560, 590 Seligman, M.E.P., 58n Sembene, Ousmane, 230n semiotics, 348–9, 616–17 Sengmüller, Gebhard, 569–71, 575 Señorita Extraviada (2001), 213, 215, 233–49, 250n

SenseCam, 560, 565n Sentenced to Marriage (2004), 374 Separations (2009), 141n Sereny, Gitta, 520n Serious Games I-IV (2009‒2010), 445–9 Seven Years in Tibet (1997), 344 sex, 5, 211–67, 636–7, 638 educational films, 212–13 female genital cutting/mutilation (FGC/M), 9, 213, 214, 217–29, 230n–1n feminicide, 213, 214, 215, 233–49 people with disabilities, 202–5 pornography, 193–4, 249n queer and transgender people, 213, 214–15, 252–67, 268n–9n, 369–73, 569 rape, 213, 214, 228, 408 sex workers, 114–15, 116, 191–206 sexual health, 212–13 trafficking, 14, 89, 91, 106–7, 108–9, 194–5 transnational marriages, 114–16, 137–9 Sex in an Epidemic (2010), 323–4 shading, vs. reading, 259–60 Shang Shung Institute, 353 Shankman, Richard, 343 Sharkey, Noel, 613 Shaviro, Steven, 576 Shell, Hanna Rose, 642–3 Shenk, Jon, 81n Shilts, Randy, 276, 279n Shinn, Rinn-Sup, 394 Shisana, O., 299 Shoah (1985), 488–9, 503n, 510, 511 Shohat, E., 380 Shub, Esther, 450n Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), 343–4 Sidibe, Kadidia, 224, 227 signs, 348–9 Silberstein, L.J., 380n Silvano, Khyentse Yeshi, 353, 354–60 Silver Platter bar (Los Angeles), 253, 260–6, 268n, 269n Silverlake Life: A View From Here (1993), 276 Silverman, Kaja, 442, 443 Simberg, Hugo, 339, 473n Simmons, Matthew, 30 Sivan, Santosh, 279n

Index 669 Siyayinqoba/Beat It! (TV series), 9, 16, 277–8, 298–312 Sjöberg, Patrik, 8, 11, 13, 16, 560–1, 564–5 Skaggs, Calvin, 338 Skoller, Jeffrey, 6 slavery, 91, 109, 113, 114, 116, 117–18 Sleep Dealer (2008), 47, 122n Slim, Lokman, 486–7 Sloane, B. Conant see Conant Sloane, B. Sloane, D.C., 294 Sloterdijk, P., 38 Slovick, Sam, 264 Small, Belinda, 223 Smith, N., 64 Smith, R., 302 Snowden, Edward J., 411, 562–3 Sobchak, Vivian, 343, 422 social media, 423, 424n, 575–7 social systems control of, 14–15, 93–107, 135–6, 149–50, 566–78, 580–606, 607n–8n failure of, 36–7, 52 network culture, 567–78 “panoptic society”, 563–4, 567–73, 578n, 581–605, 606n, 607n socialist realism, 178 Söderberg, Johan, 43, 50–2 Soderbergh, Steven, 569, 575 Sokurov, Alexander, 6, 339, 461, 462, 466–9, 473n Solanas, Fernando, 235, 435, 450n Soldier’s Dream, A (1995), 473n soldiers, training, 445–9, 451n Solio, Mary, 226 Sollecito, Raffaele, 560 Soltan, Neda Agha, 423 Solte, D., 51 Someplace with a Mountain (2010), 61–4, 65–9, 71–3, 79–80 Sonesson, Goran, 616 Sonneck, Gernot, 624 Sontag, S., 242, 243, 292, 411, 434 Soreret (2009), 373–7 Soucy, Alexander, 386 Soufrère ‒ Waiting for an Inevitable Disaster (1977), 151 Soul Buddyz (TV series), 312n

Soul City (TV series), 301 soundtracks, 31 sousveillance, 560–1, 629–44, 645n–6n South Africa, 9, 16, 277–8, 298–312 Southern AIDS Living Quilt, 331 Sower, The (Millet, 1850), 164, 169 Sower with Setting Sun (Van Gogh, 1888), 169 space and time, 14–15, 225–6, 576–8 future, 40–1, 43–57 past, 11–14, 315–32 scalar aesthetics, 38–9, 41n, 50–1, 54 spatial perception, 67–9 spatial humanities, 64 Spiritual Voices (1995), 339, 466–9, 473n spiritualism, 339 spirituality, 384–98 Spiro, Ellen, 408 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 254, 268n Spottiswoode, Roger, 276 Sprague, Gene, 624–5, 626n Spurlock, Morgan, 584 Stadler, N., 381n Stalinism, 178 Stam, R., 380 Standard Operating Procedure (2008), 411, 414, 489–91, 524, 560, 585, 608n Stanley Cup riot (June 15, 2011), 612 state public health policy, 307–8, 562 suppression of dissent, 344, 345, 346–7 surveillance, 14–15, 93–107, 135–6, 561–4, 571–3 and torture, 484–6, 554 violence, 13–14, 237, 239, 242 State of Suspension (2008), 128 Steadman, Philip, 606n Steel, Eric, 10, 620–5, 626n Steps for the Future project, 277, 302–3 Stern, Lewis M., 389 Sternberg, Michael, 43, 50–2 Stewart, Garrett, 406 Steyerl, H., 147 Steyn, J., 540 Still Life (2005), 482–3 Sting, 33 Stojanović, Lazar, 188 Stone-Breaker, The (Wallis, 1857), 169

670 Index Storck, Henri, 419 Story of Kindness, The (1985), 13, 384–98 Strand, Paul, 419 Stroheim, Erich von, 169 Study of Perspective: The Eiffel Tower (1995‒2010), 159 Styler, Trudi, 33 sub-titles and supra-titles, 139–40 subjectivity, 6–7, 9, 56, 57, 81n, 90–1, 92, 107, 164, 217, 239, 246–8, 250n, 260, 293, 301, 339, 346, 354, 390–2, 408, 526–34, 544, 554, 575–6, 637 subjunctive documentary, 46, 56–7 sublime, 39, 151, 338–9, 345–6, 465–6 suffering, depiction of, 9, 169–70, 239–40, 242–9, 511, 521n–2n, 528 see also torture Sui, Daniel, 80 suicide, 148, 620–5, 626n–7n suicide bombings, 371–3 Sun Come Up (2011), 83n Superstruct (2008), 48, 58n supra-titles, 139–40 surveillance, 8, 10, 11, 14–15, 411, 451n, 559–644 anonymity and sousveillance, 560–1, 629–44, 645n–6n audio surveillance, 559, 565n border controls, 93–107, 135–6, 571–3 definition, 559, 562 ethical issues, 172, 559, 561–5, 620–5, 626n–7n Internet surveillance, 561–4, 567–8, 569–78, 633 new technology, 101–2, 403–4, 559–63, 581, 582–5, 590–9, 607n–8n, 630–2 Panopticon, 563–4, 567–73, 578n, 581–2, 606n self-surveillance, 560, 590 and social control, 566–78, 580–606, 607n–8n surveys and information-gathering, 561–3 video forensics, 560, 600–5, 611–20, 625n in the workplace, 633–4 surveys, 561–3 Suspicious Minds (n.d.), 514, 517–18 Suzuki, Shunryu, 342 Swofford, Anthony, 425n

Swyngedouw, E., 26 Sylvester, D., 170, 172n–3n symbolism, 348, 395–8 Szeman, Imre, 4, 11, 14, 16, 24, 25, 26, 35, 36, 94 Szerszynski, B., 24 Tabuenca Córdoba, M.S., 234 Tachibelmel, A., 72, 73 Taft, Catherine, 607n Tajima-Peña, Renee, 237 Taken (2008), 108–9 Tako se kalio čelik (1988), 181 Tales of the Night Fairies (2002), 191, 199–201, 205 Tan, Lumi, 268n Tarnation (2003), 589 Taromai, M., 65 Tasaru Girls Rescue Centre, 224 Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), 13, 524, 528, 537, 538–41, 548–54 Tay, Sharon Lin, 8, 13, 14, 563–4, 603 Taylor, Brian, 576 Taylor, D., 243 Taylor, James, 560 Taylor, Philip, 392 telescoping, 342 Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (Bernstein), 202 Tenzing Sonam, 350 Terestchenko, M., 484, 485 terrorism, 411–14, 421–2 testimony, 478, 487–9, 499–501, 509–20, 526–7, 530–5 Texaco, 32–4 Texas Border, The (2010), 573 Texas Virtual Border Watch (2008‒), 571–3 Thacker, E., 291–2 Thailand, 114–16 Theissen, Hermann, 486–7 theoretical objects, definition, 133–4, 141n–2n Thet, Sambath see Sambath Thet Theuws, Roos, 132 third cinema, 132–3 Thompson, H., 151 Thondup, Tulku, 347 Thousand and One Days, A (2004), 125–8, 131

Index 671 Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion (2003), 345 Tibetan Buddhism, 341–63 Ticket to Paradise (2008), 111, 114–16 Tijuana (Mexico), 119 Timberg, Craig, 279n time future, 40–1, 43–57, 360 non-linear time, 360–3 past, 11–14, 315–32, 491–502 Tingle, A., 75 “Tipton Three”, 13, 537–48, 553–4 Tiro, Pinky, 302–3 Todorov, Tzvetan, 458 Toker, L., 545 Tolentino, Julie, 528 Tomaselli, K., 301 Tongues Untied (1990), 418 Torchin, Leshu, 4, 10, 14, 89, 91 Torre, Sergio de la, 119 Torrell, Linus, 43, 50–2 torture, 7, 9, 11, 15, 477–554 definition, 485–6 perpetrators, 7, 478–80, 503n, 506–20, 521n–2n, 524–35, 603–5, 608n representation of, 9, 15, 242–4, 477–80, 482–502, 503n, 511, 521n–2n, 527–35, 536–54, 603–5 “white torture”, 483 see also feminicide Tosi, V., 282 Tostan, 220, 224, 230n Toubia, Nadia, 222, 230n Touching Base, 202, 204 Tout va bien (1972), 188 Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), 571, 577 Towards the Other (exhibition, 2011), 126, 140 Trabzon (Turkey), 106–7 trafficking, 14, 89, 91, 106–7, 108–22 Tran Do, 388–9, 393, 398n–9n Tran Duc, 394 Tran Huy Ba, 388 Tran Van Thuy, 6, 13, 15, 384, 386, 387–98, 399n transgender documentary, 213, 214–15, 252–67, 268n–9n translation, 139–40 transnational feminist theory, 10, 217–29 transnational marriages, 114–16, 137–9

transnational networks, 103–5, 571–3 see also trafficking traumatic images, 9, 15, 242–9, 408–9, 410–24, 435–6, 478–80, 482–502 Traverso, E., 483, 486 Treichler, P.A., 308 Trinh T. Minh-ha, 131, 228, 378, 379 Trivunać, Ratibor, 185 Trungpa, Chögyam, 350 Tsang, Wu, 3, 9, 215, 253–4, 260–6, 268n, 269n Tsering, Geshe Tashi, 342 Tsha Tsha (TV series), 301–2 Tshabalala-Msimang, Manto, 307 Tucker, Michael, 456 Tulare Road (2010), 158, 159 tulku, 347–63 Tulku (2009), 350–1 Turkle, Sherry, 424n Turner, Patricia, 278n Tussilago (2010), 637–9 Tuvalu, 69, 70 Twyker, Tom, 575 ugliness, 169, 468 Ulmer, Gregory, 331 UN Protocol on Traffic, 109 UNAIDS, 298 unconscious, 462–3, 468–9, 470–1 Und Vietnam und (1966), 433 Underground (1974), 636 Unemployed, The (1968), 180 unemployment, 180, 182 Union Maids (1976), 418 unionization, 170, 195, 196–9 United States Christian Right, 338 military practices, 407–8, 410–24, 539–41, 601–5 use of torture, 7, 411, 414, 450n, 485, 489–91, 503n, 524–5, 527–30, 536–54, 555n, 603–5, 608n University of Indianapolis, 612 unwar films, 405, 409, 410–24, 425n, 426n, 433–8, 454–5, 460–71 U.R.A., 642 Urban Roots (2011), 165 Urry, J., 24

672 Index Uruo, J., 80, 82n US Agency of International Development, 229n utopia, 47 Vachani, Nilita, 111–14, 122n Vafeidis, A.T., 74, 82n Valley Centro, El (2000), 155–8, 171 van Brakel, Rosamunde E., 633 Van Gogh, Vincent, 169 Van Taylor, David, 338 Vance, C., 194 vanishing point, 158–62 Varda, Agnès, 162–4 Varnelis, Kazys, 573–4 Veiga, Reis, 33 Veits, Maria, 142n venereal diseases, 212 ventriloquism, 640–1, 645n Venuti, Lawrence, 135 Verhoeff, Nann, 424 Vertov, Dziga, 8, 417, 418, 425n victims, definition, 485–6 video essays, 106–7 video forensics, 560, 600–5, 611–20, 625n Video Remains (2005), 276, 315–16 Video Surveillance Piece: Public Room, Private Room (1969-1970), 593 Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), 635–6, 645n Vietnam war, 405, 413–14, 415–18, 432–8, 449n, 455, 602–3 Vigny, Alfred de, 513 Villaseñor, María Cristina, 238, 246 violence see feminicide; war Virilio, Paul, 431, 438 virtual reality (VR) games, 445–9, 451n virus, 5–6, 10–11, 273–332, 562 AIDS/HIV, 10–11, 256–7, 262, 275–8, 279n, 298–312, 314–32 micro-cinematography and bioinformatics, 274–5, 280–95 Visual AIDS (website), 319–20, 333n visualization, 11, 12–15 dislocation, 96 geopolitics, 225–6 grief, 241–9, 315–17, 320–32

microscopic images, 274–5, 280–95 networks, 576–8 oil industry, 38–9, 41n, 151 rising sea levels, 24–5, 61–80, 81n–2n and the sublime, 39, 151, 338–9, 345–6, 465–6 torture, 491–502 war, 410–24 Vivre sa vie (1962), 180 Vizeu, Rosa, 500 Vogel, Amos, 635–6 voices, 139–40, 637, 640–1, 645n von Lünen, A., 64 von Stroheim, Erich see Stroheim, Erich von Voruz, Véronique, 582–3 VR games, 445–9, 451n Wachowski, Andy and Lana, 569 Wahlberg, Malin, 594–5 Wajda, Andrej, 185 Wald, Priscilla, 278n Waldby, C., 289 Walker, Alice, 219, 220–2 Walker, Janet, 4, 14, 24–5, 46, 47, 50 Walker, Lucy, 164–5 Wallace, Mike, 594 Walleston, Aimee, 268n Wallis, Henry, 169 Walsh, Shannon, 28, 37 war, 6–7, 12, 15, 403–71 Afghanistan, 406–7, 456–9, 466–9, 536, 537, 548–53 Cold War, 438–42 documentation of, 403–9, 432, 601–5 Gulf Wars, 405–6, 444–5 Iraq, 151, 405, 406–7, 410–24, 425n, 426n, 445–9, 456–9, 503n, 524–5, 529–30, 545, 608n Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 135–6, 142n, 366–80, 381n–2n, 640–1 paramilitarist documentary, 455–60, 472n post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 446–7 and rape, 214, 228, 408 terrorism and political protest, 411–14, 421–2, 423 training for, 445–9, 451n

Index 673 unwar films, 405, 409, 410–24, 425n, 426n, 433–8, 454–5, 460–71 veterans, 407–8 Vietnam, 405, 413–14, 415–18, 432–8, 449n, 455, 602–3 war crimes, 408, 486, 548–54, 601–5, 608n, 640–1 weapons and military technology, 403–4, 434–8, 450n see also torture War and Cinema (Virilio), 431 War Game, The (1965), 48 War Tapes, The (2006), 415 Ward, Anna E., 16, 151 Ward, C., 37 Ward, Gary, 135–6 Ward, R.G., 69 Warrenbrand, Jane, 212, 218 Warrior Marks (1993), 219, 220–2, 225, 227 Watkins, Peter, 48, 478, 545 Watney, Simon, 332 Waugh, T., 150, 425n, 472n We Care: A Video for Care Providers of People Affected by AIDS (1990), 320–2 We Were Here: The AIDS Years in San Francisco (2011), 325 weapons, 403, 404, 434–8, 450n Wearing, Gillian, 641 Weaving the Web (Berners-Lee), 316–17 Webb, J.W., 69 Weber, Bill, 325 Weile, Mathias, 399n Weissman, David, 325 Weitzer, R., 191 Wellman, Barry, 560, 633–4 Wenzel, J., 29 “Werther Effect”, 624, 626n Wexler, Haskell, 488 Wharton, L., 381n Wheel of Time (2003), 345 When Mother Comes Home for Christmas (1996), 111–14, 117 Whitaker, Reginald, 592 White Christmas (1968), 433 White, H., 508, 516, 519 White, J., 545 White, Patricia, 9, 16, 213, 214, 215

White, Rob, 603 Whiteside, Alan, 278n Why Cybraceros? (1997), 121 Wie man sieht (1986), 438 Wieviorka, A., 488, 504n Wilder, Geert, 340 wildlife documentaries, 52 see also biodiversity Wildness (2012), 3, 213, 214–15, 253, 255, 260–6, 268n, 269n Williams, L., 43, 193, 212, 325, 411, 414, 422 Williams, R., 44, 45, 541 Willsher, K., 148 Wilson, Dean, 6, 13, 14, 15, 339–40 Winfrey, Oprah, 222 Winnicott, Donald, 358 Winston, Brian, 8, 10, 165–6, 170, 171, 172n, 342, 480, 560, 561, 564, 613, 618, 622 Winter Soldier (1972), 635–6, 645n Winterbottom, Michael, 420, 537–48, 549, 553–4 Winton, E., 150 Wiseman, Frederick, 149, 589, 599 Wissot, L., 58n Wolf, M., 46 Wolf, M.J.P., 102, 289–90 Wolf, Nicole, 470, 473n Wolfe, Nathan, 279n Wollen, P., 169, 170, 426n women agency, 246–8, 528–30 domestic workers, 111–14 female genital cutting/mutilation (FGC/M), 9, 213, 214, 217–29, 230n–1n feminicide, 213, 214, 215, 233–49 human rights, 222, 225–6, 228–9, 230n, 233–49 identity, 250n, 264–5, 268n, 370–3, 374–7 marriage, 114–16, 137–8 mothers, 111–14, 124–5, 136–40, 242, 245, 250n and rape, 214, 228, 408 and religion, 346, 367, 370–7 as resistance fighters, 440 self-mutilation, 376

674 Index women (Cont’d) sex workers, 114–15, 116, 191–206 sexual health, 212 as torturers, 7, 524–35 Women Make Movies (WMM), 217, 218–19, 222, 228, 229n, 231n Women With Open Eyes (1994), 229n–30n Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise, 320–2 Women’s International Network, 219 work, 5, 147–206 and aesthetics, 155–72 agricultural workers, 117–18, 155–8, 162–5, 188–9 domestic workers, 111–14 factory workers, 119–22, 150–1, 170, 182–9 film industry, 148–9, 181–2 health and safety issues, 111, 120, 151–2, 166 ideology, 169–70, 176–8, 205–6 migrant workers, 94–5, 98–9, 108–22, 155–6, 178, 179, 181–2 pay and conditions, 111, 113, 119–20, 147–50, 165, 166–8, 169, 188–9, 194–206 and post-socialism, 150–1, 176–89 sex workers, 114–15, 116, 191–206 surveillance, 633–4 unemployment, 180, 182 unionization, 170, 195, 196–9 Workers Leaving the Factory (1895), 171 Workers Leaving the Factory (1995), 171 Working Man’s Death (2005), 166 World Bank, 118–19 World Expo (Brisbane, 1988), 44 World Health Organization, 229n World Without Oil (2007), 48 Worte des Vorsitzenden, Die (The Words of the Chairman, 1967), 432–3

Wotton, Rachel, 202–5 Wounded Angel, The (Simberg, 1903), 339 WuDunn, Sheryl, 220 XVIVO, 275, 280, 290–3 Yanomami, 617–20 Yap, 65, 69, 70, 71, 73, 77–9 Yash Raj Films, 562 Year’s Midnight, The (2011), 645n–6n Yizo Yizo (TV series), 301–2 Yogis of Tibet, The (2002), 345 Yossi and Jagger (2002), 371–2 Young, E., 147 Young, John, 607n Young, O., 73 Young, Tomas, 408 Yugoslavian cinema, 176–89 Yusoff, K., 23, 47, 64–5, 76–7 Z32 (2008), 640–1 Zapruder, Abraham, 600–1 Zeiger, David, 416 Zero Dark Thirty (2012), 524, 527 zero-hours contracts, 148–9 Zetter, K., 291 Žilnik, Želimir, 5, 10, 150–1, 179, 180–9 Zimmerman, Patricia R., 411, 415, 425n Zimmermann, Anatol K., 94–7 Zionism, 367–9, 377–9, 381n Žižek, Slavoj, 39, 344–5, 485 Zmarz-Koczanowicz, Maria, 178 Zorko, Jerry, 421 Zubrycki, Tom, 81n Zuria, Anat, 374–7 Zwischen zwei Kriegen (1978), 435, 450n

WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.wiley.com/go/eula to access Wiley’s ebook EULA.