“Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought.” — Walter Benjamin
Still from Recollection (Kamal Aljafari, 2015)
Two films in one day, two archive dives yielding nothing but absence, yet yielding, in both cases and completely coincidentally, to the filmmakers’ will to be seen in the unseen. The archive is never a full load, it never fully returns the embrace, never adequately enlivens at the touch of a curious hand. It coyly withholds while holding out the promise of full satisfaction. There is only so much it will present, especially to unexpected suitors. When Alia Syed, a Pakistani-Scottish-British filmmaker, is offered a chance to make any film she wants drawing from the BBC Scotland archive, it is the archive that is surprised, not the artist. The artist knows she’s unlikely to find herself or her likeness amongst the thousands of hours of footage. She searches, dutifully, but will not find. The archive, however, is simply unprepared. It never imagined this moment, never had any image of her in its head. There are films aplenty, and even some about South Asian immigrants to Scotland, but they were never meant for her to see. They were meant for the people, the eternal hosts, the owners of the image. Who, it turns out, always had a very limited imagination, that did not figure on her active presence. She looks, she sees, she is profoundly unmoved. She nonetheless, in an indirect move of resistance, a deflection of sorts, decides to use other images, images of destabilization, slum clearances, homelessness, as well as images of weaving, spinning, cloth making, a trade that has no connection to her past save for a beloved lace tablecloth that she could not throw away as she clears her father’s house, a cloth bought and borne of Scotland, yet so much a part of her father’s house that she could not bear to part with it. So weaving and cloth, wending and wharfing, incessant machinations of industrial lace-making: the fullest extent to which the archive can be shaped to her needs. It gives in but without bending. By the end of this battle of wills, one intentional, the other institutional, in the last moments of the film, this filmmaker forces the archive to offer up the signs of its repressed images; she finds a little mixed race boy at the edge of a frame. A single shot of half a boy, a ghost who haunts the entire archive, insistent yet semi-obscured. He can only be a weak stand-in for all that the archive misses and misrepresents, meekly hovering at the edge of the frame, tentatively yet stubbornly announcing his presence, and this demi-world vision is enough to undermine the entire promise of the archive.
Kamal Aljafari takes an altogether different approach to the archive in his film Recollection. Aljafari also mines the archive, though not one that has been purposely or publically collected. His archive is a wealth of fiction films made by Israeli directors, shot in his hometown of Jaffa. It turns out Jaffa was a favorite setting for Israeli films, so there’s no shortage of imagery. Jaffa provided the perfect backdrop to Israeli drama, giving them the aura of an historical presence in the land they had only recently settled. For the Israelis the problem was getting rid of traces of Arab life, still vibrant if muted in the city. For Aljafari, the problem was to recoup the traces that could never be fully erased and which press insistently at the corners and margins of the frame. He spots his aunt’s house, the local café, a family friend’s car. He scours these images in search of home, the very home the Israelis have tried with their fictions, as well as with their ideology, laws, and wrecking balls, so hard to destroy.
Like most fiction films, these Israeli films foreground their characters, yet the bodies of those actors interfered with Aljafari’s view. It’s as if he had to figure out a way to crane his vision to see past the action, around and behind the main event, as it were. He does this by digitally removing those in the path of his forensic sight. Using fairly basic technological tools—AfterEffects, mostly—Aljafari deftly disappears the Israelis, leaving mostly buildings and roads but also the occasional Palestinian, spotted from afar on a balcony, or in a doorway.
Against all odds, he even finds his uncle in one scene, looking literally lost, as he wanders haplessly across the frame. One wonders how his presence was justified within the film’s narrative, as (not unlike Syed’s little boy) he lurks eerily in view. With the Israeli’s disappeared, Aljafari reclaims the spaces of his childhood and young adulthood, his memories veritably reconstituted amidst the wreckage. He stages a cinematic return to a territory otherwise occupied, a reconnaissance tour of that which was never supposed to be seen.
In perhaps the most deft reversal ever effected in cinema, the digital intervention that up until now has been understood as the biggest threat to documentary authenticity, suddenly becomes its greatest ally, transforming otherwise fiction films into the indexical referent of documented Palestinian existence. Despite all odds, it allows Aljafari to exclaim “we are here!”, thus revealing the fiction of Israeli ‘history’ in that land and affirming the documentary truth that Israelis have gone to such lengths to deny.
The films were not screened together nor did I set out to see them both on that one single day. But the double viewing prompted me to consider the effects of the unintended archive, when the archive itself is subjected to treatment for which it had never been intended and the results transform the promise it holds out: exposing historical omissions, reversing wilful erasures and in the process, transforming historical fictions into stubborn and ineradicable fact.
Note: For a brilliant review of Recollection that makes a similar yet distinct argument, see Adania Shibli’s 8 April 2017 review in Ibraaz.
What the Fields Remember (Subasri Krishnan, 2015)
Last
week I watched two films, one on Thursday, the second on Friday. On Thursday I
went to see Spectre, as all
self-respecting queer feminist film scholars who specialise in documentary
must. For reasons that continue to elude me, Bond seems to be one of the only
exceptions, not just for me but for many I know, to a general disdain for
testosterone-fuelled, generally racist, sexist and homophobic action films. Why
does Bond get a pass when virtually none others do, I really can’t say. Perhaps
it has something to do with the tinge of camp that lingers around the edges of
his too immaculate, too suave, too impossibly genteel persona. And perhaps too
because Bond, unlike some other action heroes, seems to be changing (ever so glacially,
but changing nonetheless) with the times. By now he’s only about a decade or
two behind the times, no longer the Neanderthal he once was with regard to
gender and sexual relations at least.
Be
that as it may, I saw the latest Bond film, and enjoyed it more or less, with
the sense that perhaps the formula was wearing slightly thin, but more
importantly, that I might be getting a tad too old to weather the bursts of
adrenaline and vexed attention required in the viewing. I was already exhausted
after the nail biting, vertiginously shot, helicopter scene, staged beautifully
over the Zócalo in Mexico City. I wanted to check my phone to see how much more
of it I’d have to survive, but I didn’t dare disturb my neighbors who seemed to
watch with wrapped attention (and a handy flask of whiskey in their grip).
Besides, I knew we couldn’t be more than 10 minutes in.
Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015)
The
next night found me in virtually the opposite environment, swapping plush,
reclining, stadium seats for rigid chairs with built-in desks, and a 30’ screen
with sensurround for a dim data projector and two studio speakers. The film I
went to see, in a SOAS classroom, was an understated, meditative documentary
about the barely remembered “Nellie Massacres” that occurred in Assam, India,
roughly 30 years ago, a xenophobic mob killing spree lasting only 6 hours, that
ended with up to 10,000 dead. What the
Fields Remember (Subasri Krishnan, 2015) was having its third small screening in
London, having just been completed this Autumn. There are no serious prospects
for distribution deals outside of India and no expectation of major audiences,
let alone direct political effect.
I
don’t honestly think two films could be more different. Where one is pervasive,
saturating screens globally, the other will barely ever get seen. Where one
wears its multi-million dollar budget on its screen, the other is clearly made
on a shoe-string. Where one cuts long before you’ve even fully registered the
shot, the other lingers as if painstakingly extracting information, with the
patience of a prospector from the mute earth.
The
film reminded me of some of the more thoughtful documentaries I’ve seen, films
like Susana de Sousa Dias’ film 48 (2009),
which privileges affect over content in its treatment of the audio interviews
of political prisoners in Portugal, counter-intuitively yet effectively making
their testimonies that much more powerful, or Rithy Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), where survivor and
jailers are framed together yet never levelled into an equivalency, due
precisely to the heightened sensibility of the filmmaker in relation to the
subject. It also harkened me back to some of the more aggressive,
perpetrator-led films of late (The Act of
Killing immediately comes to mind), if only because it so clearly eschews any
such sensationalist strategies, despite the fact that there are similarities to
be drawn, most notably that the killers have never been called to account and
remain not only at large, but in power.
What the Fields Remember is a film that knows how
to listen, to observe, that insistently yet respectfully seeks to draw out its
subject, without compromising dignity or playing on emotions. Choosing her
characters carefully and never privileging words over images for too long,
Krishnan subtly suggests that there are many ways tell a story, and the most
interesting are not necessarily conveyed linearly through narrative. The
filmmaker was present at the small screening, and was so refreshingly
thoughtful and articulate about her new work, that I could have listened to her
forever.
I
found it intriguing that a film about so gruesome a topic could soothe my soul,
after the assault of the previous night’s action-packed adventure film with the
inevitably happy ending. What that says about me, perhaps is better left aside
for the moment. Granted, What the Fields
Remember is not only grim in its recollection of history, but in its
resonances in the anti-Muslim sentiments of contemporary India, and yet, what I
found reassuring was its approach. Intelligent filmmaking, with a sensibility
that privileges subtle undertones rather than garish overtones, that is
politically insightful, attentive to detail and the particularities of the
event and the context, while always striving to be formally inventive, this is
what I long for, and this (not the subject matter, I can safely say) is what
relieved my harried sensibilities from the night before. I much prefer to be
jarred by history than by flashy stunts, explosions, and special effects, it
turns out. Good to know.
Keywords:
Spectre, James Bond, Political Documentary, Subasri Krishnan, What the Fields Remember, Susana de
Sousa Dias, 48, Rithy Panh, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, Act of Killing
Footage openly criticizing Assad, from A Syrian Love Story (Sean McAllister, 2015)
Trigger
Warning: this is a rant. I had not meant for my first blog post to reveal my
more lacerating tendencies, but there you go. The screening of a much-lauded
film in England about Syria that I felt compelled, or rather practically propelled,
to see, prompted this admittedly provocative response. And for the record, I am
about as fond of trigger warnings, as I am of the film about to be discussed.
Two
things tempered my experience of watching A
Syrian Love Story (Sean McAllister, 2015), both related to the filmmaker’s
presence at the Bertha DocHouse screening I attended in London. The first was
by way of introduction. The filmmaker wanted to thank his producer for all the
work she had done on the project, having forgotten to do so in the initial
screening of the film at the cinema that week. He self deprecatingly
acknowledged that he was so busy pandering to the members of the audience
affiliated with the BBC and the BFI that he simply forgot to mention her. He
then introduced her solely by first name and described her as more his
secretary than his producer. Following this inauspicious beginning, he proudly
announced that he would have bought her flowers, but he’s from Hull and “boys
from Hull” don’t buy women flowers. Not only had he endlessly gendered her
contribution in typically derogatory ways (is this really how one treats one’s
producer and if so, what does that say about the filmmaker himself?) but he further
managed to denigrate it as if really all she had done was make his appointments
and his coffee.
The
second inauspicious remark was made in the Q+A after the film, where the
filmmaker insisted proudly that no matter where he makes his films, Japan,
Yemen, Syria, his primary audience is always the same: his mates back in Hull who
don’t travel the world like he does. This may not sound like a damning
indictment to all readers, but it smacks of precisely the islander
provincialism that would allow for a film to be made about one of the most
complex and intractable political and humanitarian crises unfolding today, in a
way that very nearly bypasses those complexities in favour of a familiar
generic mould that could console an ignorant viewer in Hull. Transform the
tragedy of a failed revolution turned bloody civil war, into a personal tragedy
of love, worn thin by the inchoate tensions of an indecipherable external world
pressing in on an otherwise “normal” [read: “just like us”] household. The
assumption is that the politics of the situation are beyond the grasp of the
simple publicans of McAllister’s hometown, but that love and difficult
relationships are something we can all understand.
Further,
we learn early in the film that McAllister is a filmmaker in search of a
subject and when he finds a suitably dramatic scenario (loving husband bringing
up a family while wife is unjustly imprisoned by a despotic regime) he recklessly
homes in on their personal lives, probing their inner emotions, soliciting
responses to leading questions, captures incriminating footage (of the family openly
criticising the Assad regime, for instance), endangering their lives to the
point of forcing their flight from the country, and then in effect,
contributing to the ruination of a delicate yet viable relationship. The style
of interviewing consists of, in essence, dogging the family members in English,
a language most can barely speak, to simply repeat (mimic) the words he
provides them with in the first place, thus confirming his place as voice-giver
to these otherwise inarticulate subjects. He plays therapist to a family in
crisis, with none of the training nor the emotional maturity to do so. A boy
from Hull, who can’t even bring himself to respect his own producer properly,
grants himself the powerful position of peace-maker and arbiter of a family drama
that so far exceeds the limits of his emotional intelligence as to be an act of
aggression in and of itself.
Here
we have the worst of the filmmaker-adventurer, who blithely and with all of the
entitlement of a (former) imperialist culture, takes and exacerbates a family
crisis all for the exalted goal of enlightening his ignorant friends back home.
The worst part about it is that everyone, from his commissioning editor at
Channel four, to the powerful decision makers on BBC1 who made the unprecedented
decision to broadcast it there, not to mention the 4 stars given it by Mark
Kermode in the Guardian, are contributing to the filmmaker’s own
self-congratulatory belief that his film is indeed a great masterpiece fusing
art (tragic love story, a la Romeo and Juliette) with geo-politics in a way the
great and good, if somewhat naïve and unworldly, people of England can
understand.
The
problem isn’t with the great people of England per se, who may or may not need
to pandering to such a degree, but with the condescension of the filmmakers and
commissioning editors, who would prefer to distil a complicated and intractable
situation down to a story of star-crossed lovers, doomed by external
circumstances beyond their control. Was it even external circumstances beyond
their control that forced the family to flee Syria in one night, with only a
flimsy suitcase and no proper papers? Well, in a sense, yes. If McAllister hadn’t gotten caught with the
footage of the family still in his camera, they might have been able to stay in
their home and had time to come to grips with their situation. Yet, given the
risks this family had already undertaken as vocal critics of the regime even
before the uprising and ensuing war, it is inconceivable to me that a filmmaker
could add to the danger they already faced. Made that much further unimaginable
by the fact that his continued filming was evidence of his implacable pursuit
of his story—the unfolding drama, in part catalysed by his negligence and
misplaced priorities—had to find its conclusion. Tragic or happy, it had to be
resolved one way or the other and he would track them down wherever they might
be (Lebanon, France, Turkey) I order to get the footage that would complete his
story. More than once the subjects of the film question him as to why he is
still there, filming them.
I
have devoted my life to the documentary. I have made films and have studied
others’ films. I write about, think about, and watch documentary during more of
my waking hours than I can account for. Yet sometimes, when faced with films
like this one, I hate the form. Documentary, thankfully, is so much more than
this type of ambulance-chasing story-telling factory, needing human fodder to
churn out gripping content in order to fill meaningless (if self-important) television
programming hours. It can and often does do justice to the intricacies of
history, to poetry, to life in general. It is the filmic form best suited for
critique, defamiliarization, intellectual and ideological transformation. But
when documentary goes for ratings, it generally does play to the simplistic
formulas that palliate the fear of the other, transforming it into an anodyne
reflection of ourselves—a reassuring message that no matter how different
people may seem, we’re all the same in the end. Whether we are or are not all
the same in the end, our circumstances are wildly different, as is our mode of
expression. Imagine if Amer and Raghda, the couple at the heart of the film,
could have expressed themselves in their native tongue, how much less naïve and
basic they would have seemed. Yet that complexity had to be disallowed, in
order for McAllister to tell a simple tale.
This
is not an indictment of documentary per se. It is an indictment of the career
documentarist who doggedly pursues people as if they are merely material for a
story he can then, in effect, tell back at his local, over a pint. If you
intend to point your camera at people, be sure that it is their lives, more
than your career or your mates back home, that you are concerned with.
Moreover, it strikes me that if there is any responsibility associated with the
documentary filmmaker, it is precisely not to reduce their subjects to objects—mere
matter for their message. There are so many ways to resist the formulaic and
the simplistic, yet if opportunism is driving the filmmaker forward, as in this
case, they are unlikely to make the effort to see what is actually there,
preferring instead to shape the material into well-worn, familiar patterns.
Keywords: Documentary film, Documentary ethics, Sean McAllister, A
Syrian Love Story