Five years since the illegal and unprovoked aggression launched by American and British forces, and amounting to either one of the most delusional or cynical assessments on the Iraq war since George W. Bush’s famous “Mission Accomplished” speech in 2003, British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith says the country is now safe enough for asylum seekers to return home.
The proposed thirty-minute current affairs film will challenge dialectically the Home Office view and denounce how those who launched and supported the invasion are failing to take responsibility, juxtaposing the official discourse with the reaffirmed realities that have been proved, and proved again, but just as doggedly denied by those in power, forcing us to live trapped between two narratives of present history.
Behind the official rhetoric, the poignant truth:
1) Iraqis were promised freedom, democracy and prosperity. Instead they have seen the physical and social destruction of their country, mass killing, tens of thousands thrown into jail without trial, rampant torture, an epidemic of sectarian terror attacks, pauperization, and the complete breakdown of basic services and supplies. An end to this situation remains far from sight.
2) The UK involvement in Iraq should compel its government to open its doors. But for thousands of Iraqi asylum seekers there is no welcome; instead they face ill treatment, misery and destitution before they are deported, as changes in British asylum policy are introduced to restrict the admission of migrants to the UK.
The film will thus listen to the voices of those Iraqis on both sides of the fence of the asylum process, in particular those fearing for their lives back home and hoping for a new beginning in Britain.
Aesthetically, “In Safe Hands” will align itself with English filmmaker Adam Curtis' characteristic montage technique (as seen in his BBC documentary series 'The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom'), relying heavily on archived footage and editorial voice-over. This material will additionally be inter-cut alongside interviews of Iraqi refugees, purposely lit to highlight the sense of alienation.
The film will convey the build-up to the invasion and its immediate aftermath: the false WMD claims (eg. Colin Powell presenting phony intelligence in his report on Iraq's WMD delivered at the United Nations); the Azores three meeting and the bombing of Baghdad; graphic images of the conflict; Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech in 2003.
Archived reports and news items will illustrate the evolution and escalation of the conflict leading to the long lasting bloodbath of sectarian violence as Sunni and Shia insurgencies against the US-led coalition convulse the country despite (or because of) the latest American surge.
Contrasts will be highlighted between these facts, the increasing number of Iraqi deaths and the diminishing approved asylum claims in the UK over the last five years.
As news of unrest continue to be reported, Bush will proclaim the Iraq war has been a “major strategic victory” in the “war on terror;” Former Spanish Prime Minister and Bush acolyte Jose Maria Aznar will describe the situation in Iraq, 80,000 dead civilians on, as very good; the British Government will claim Iraq is now safe despite the conflict, meaning that more than 1,400 rejected Iraqi refugees will be given a deadline to go home after being asked to sign a waiver agreeing the government will take no responsibility for what happens to them or their families once they return to Iraq - or face destitution in Britain by being refused the minimal welfare support they are currently on.
The official line will be contested by refugees first hand accounts throughout.
© Jose M Barea Velazquez, April 2008
Saturday 19 April 2008
On filming the Iraq aftermath (research paper excerpts)
The original premise for the enclosed hard-edged, current affairs thirty-minute slot proposal is relatively simple: five years since the illegal invasion of Iraq by American and British forces, Iraq is drowning in a bloodbath of vicious sectarian violence, and those who launched and supported this aggression are failing to take responsibility. Seumas Milne from the Guardian reports:
“The unprovoked aggression launched by the US and Britain against Iraq five years ago today has already gone down across the world as, to borrow the words of President Roosevelt, ‘a day which will live in infamy’. Iraqis were promised freedom, democracy and prosperity. Instead (…) they have seen the physical and social destruction of their country, mass killing, tens of thousands thrown into jail without trial, rampant torture, an epidemic of sectarian terror attacks, pauperization, and the complete breakdown of basic services and supplies.”
Former head of UN inspections in Iraq in 2003, Hans Blix, annotates:
“The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a tragedy – for Iraq, for the US, for the UN, for truth and human dignity (…) The elimination of weapons of mass destruction was the declared main aim of the war (…) Responsibility for the war must rest, though, on what those launching it knew by March 2003. By then, Unmovic inspectors had carried out some 700 inspections at 500 sites without finding prohibited weapons. The contract that George Bush held up before Congress to show that Iraq was purchasing uranium oxide was proved to be a forgery. The allied powers were on thin ice, but they preferred to replace question marks with exclamation marks. They could not succeed in eliminating WMDs because they did not exist. Nor could they succeed in the declared aim to eliminate al-Qaida operators, because they were not in Iraq. They came later, attracted by the occupants.”
On this occasion, however, my efforts will not focus necessarily or exclusively in questioning the legality of this war - given that the invasion of Iraq indeed remains regarded as illegal not only in the eyes of the majority of “the UN Security Council, its secretary general, and the overwhelming weight of international legal opinion” , but also confirmed by the transcripts of the “Crawford Memo” . Instead, I will be looking at the aftermath of this unjustifiable aggression.
At the time this paper is being written, the dimension of this tragedy is reaching an epic scale: a conservative estimate of civilian deaths that ranges from hundred of thousands to over a million, and two million refugees driven from their homes in Iraq. And yet, according to official figures, only about one sixth of the Iraqis seeking asylum in the UK is allowed to remain .
By 2007 Britain was being urged by the UN to play a leading role in tackling the grave humanitarian crisis of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees by resettling some in the UK and by stopping the deportation of asylum seekers. The Guardian reports:
“(…)The UNHCR estimates that 40,000-50,000 people are fleeing Iraq every month, adding to an estimated two million refugees, most in Syria and Jordan.
"We believe that because of the UK's involvement in the Iraq conflict, the UK should be playing a leading role in addressing this humanitarian crisis," said Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Refugee Council in a joint open letter urging Mr Blair to adopt "a more generous, more principled, more coherent, and more far-sighted set of UK policies".
Britain approves just 12% of Iraqi asylum claims, compared with a 91% approval rate in Sweden, which has suspended forcible refugee returns.”
A year on, with no end to the carnage in Iraq in sight, these figures have almost doubled:
“The number of Iraqis applying for asylum across the EU almost doubled last year, rising from 19,375 to 38,286, reflecting the growing chaos in the country, according to UN figures released today.
The resurgence in the number of Iraqis fleeing across Europe comes as the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees says the Iraqi refugee crisis - with 4.5 million people uprooted by the conflict - continues to represent one of its biggest challenges.
For the second year in a row the UN's refugee agency says Iraq was the main source of asylum seekers in the EU during 2007, accounting for a fifth of all those claiming refugee status last year. The trend was mirrored in Britain where the number of Iraqis claiming asylum rose from 1,300 in 2006 to 2,075 last year.”
Britain response to the situation? Tightening the claim process. Indeed, immigration was a major electoral issue in the 2005 election campaigns and in an attempt to gain voter support, subsequent changes in British asylum policy have focused on restricting the admission of migrants to the UK.
The Guardian:
“Before the 2003 invasion, almost half of Iraqi asylum claims were successful. Since then, the recognition rate has fallen to an average of less than 3%. This is despite the fact that, throughout the war, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees has advised that Iraqi asylum seekers – particularly those from the central and southern areas – should be either recognized as refugees or provided with another form of protection. In the period preceding the invasion an average of 800 Iraqis were granted asylum each year in this country; since 2003 numbers have fallen to between five and 150, while applications have averaged about 1,500 per year during this period.”
However, despite the proven facts, the simplicity of my premise didn’t necessarily translate into an easy subject to tackle from an investigative perspective - beyond checking stats and sources that could translate into analytical trends, and eventually, fact-finding (let us pretend for a moment that the exposé quality of the piece could be left to a second plane), where is the story? And more importantly, what is the angle? With an unrealistic time constraint of six weeks, I set out to find the answer.
(…)
As a result of my research, and a compulsive and thorough consumption of both daily and archived independent news, two main narrative leads have emerged:
1. A common denominator of ill treatment of asylum seekers (on their own account) by the Home Office. The following case study may help illustrating this point:
“Two Iraqis, Fazzel Abdula Ahmad and Sarwar Rahid Mohammad, have been deported to the Kurdistan region in the past week, according to refugee groups. More than 90 Iraqi Kurds have been returned since August 2005.
Initially the deportees were sent in large groups on military flights from RAF Brize Norton, via Cyprus, to the new airfield near the Kurdish city of Irbil. They complained about being handcuffed and were ordered to wear flak jackets as they flew over Iraq.
Like others more recently returned to northern Iraq, Ahmad and Mohammad were given tickets for a commercial flight on Royal Jordanian Airlines. Once in the capital, Amman, deportees are transferred on to a civilian flight to Irbil.
“Iraq, including Kurdistan, is dangerous. The UK government must stop forcibly deporting Iraqi Kurds," said Dashty Jamal of the International Federation of Iraqi Refugeees. "Fazzel's wife and child are currently missing in Iraq and he fears his life will be in danger.”
One Iraqi refugee, Solyman Rashed, who agreed after 15 months in a UK detention centre to voluntarily return to northern Iraq, was killed in a car attack in the city of Kirkuk.
Another refugee, Burhan Namiq, 28, complained in an open letter after being deported 18 months ago back to his native Sulaimaniya in Kurdistan: "I sought asylum in the United Kingdom, stayed and lived there without committing any crime for two years, but you did not accept my claim for asylum.
“That decision made me depressed, isolated and forced me to consider suicide. The treatment in detention and the deportation can only be described as inhuman and humiliating.
“Only two days after my removal I was sent to hospital. I had suffered a heart attack due to depression and the inhuman treatment I received whilst in your 'care'.””
2. Despite escalation of conflict in Iraq (at the time this article is going to print, a confidential draft agreement covering the future of US forces in Iraq, passed to the Guardian, allegedly shows that provision is being made for an open-ended military presence in the country ), “we are being subjected to a renewed barrage of spin about the success of the US surge in turning the country around, quelling the violence and opening the way to a sunlit future :”
Former Spanish Prime Minister and Bush acolyte Jose Maria Aznar declared to BBC Radio 4 on March 18th 2008 that the situation in Iraq is very good .
On March 19th 2008 George W Bush proclaims the Iraq war a “major strategic victory” in the “war on terror.” The Guardian reports:
“George Bush marked the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion yesterday with an uncompromising speech in which he described the war as noble, necessary and just, and claimed there was now an unprecedented Arab uprising under way against Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida.
(…)‘Five years into this battle, there is an understandable debate over whether the war was worth fighting, whether the fight is worth winning, and whether we can win it,’ he said. ‘The answers are clear to me: removing Sadam Hussein from power was the right decision – and this is a fight Americans must win. Because we acted, the world is better and the United States of America is safer.’
(…)‘For the terrorists, Iraq was supposed to be the place where al-Qaida rallied Arab masses to drive America out. Instead, Iraq has become the place where Arabs joined with Americans to drive al-Qaida out. In Iraq, we are witnessing the first large-sclae Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden… An the significance of this development cannot be overstated.’”
March 13th. According to leaked Home Office correspondence seen and disclosed by The Guardian, the British Government says Iraq is now safe despite the conflict. More than 1,400 rejected Iraqi refugees could be given a deadline to go home and be asked to sign a waiver agreeing the government will take no responsibility for what happens to them or their families once they return to Iraq - or face destitution in Britain by being refused the minimal welfare support they are currently on. The decision by the home secretary Jacqui Smith to declare that it is safe to send refugees back to Iraq comes after more than 78 people have been killed in incidents across the country on that week alone.
Confronting this blatant official deceit with the voices of those Iraqis trapped on both sides of the fence of the asylum process and the “reaffirmed realities that have been proved, and proved again, but just as doggedly denied by those in power, forcing us to live trapped between two narratives of present history” will be the ultimate goal of this film.
© Jose M Barea Velazquez, April 2008
Seumas Milne, "There must be a reckoning for this day of infamy." The Guardian, March 20th 2008.
Hans Blix, " A war of utter folly." The Guardian, Thursday March 20th 2008.
Seumas Milne, "There must be a reckoning for this day of infamy." The Guardian, March 20th 2008.
Ernesto Ekaizer, "Bush avisó a Aznar de que estaría en Bagdad en marzo con o sin resolución de la ONU." El Pais, 25th September 2007
Facts and figures enclosed in the appendix.
Ian Black (Middle East editor) "Take more Iraqi refugees, UN tells Britain." The Guardian, April 17th 2007
Alan Travis (home affairs editor) "Chaos in Iraq sparks surge in EU asylum applications." The Guardian, Tuesday March 18th 2008
Hannah Godfrey, "From Baghdad to Britain." The Guardian (G2) March 20th 2008
Alan Travis, "The treatment is humiliating." (case study) The Guardian March 13th 2008
Seumas Milne, "Secret US plan for military future in Iraq." The Guardian, April 8th 2008
Seumas Milne, "There must be a reckoning for this day of infamy." The Guardian, March 20th 2008.
P. X. DE S. "Aznar asegura que ‘la situación en Irak es muy buena.’" El Pais, March 19th 2008
Ewen MacAskill (in Washington) "Bush: The battle in Iraq is noble, it is necessary and it is just." The Guardian, March 20th 2008
Alan Travis (home affairs editor) "Iraqi asylum seekers given deadline to go home or face destitution in UK." The Guardian March 13th 2008
Mark Danner, "The Moment Has Come to Get Rid of Saddam" New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 17. November 8th, 2007
Selected bibliography/webography
• Ernesto Ekaizer, "Bush avisó a Aznar de que estaría en Bagdad en marzo con o sin resolución de la ONU." El Pais, September 25th 2007
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Bush/aviso/Aznar/estaria/Bagdad/marzo/resolucion/ONU/elpepuint/20070925elpepuint_17/Tes
• Fred Attewil, "Judge orders return to UK of 15-year-old Iraqi refugee." The Guardian, December 19th 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/dec/19/immigration.politics
• Aida Edemariam, "The true cost of war (Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz counts the true cost of the Iraq war)", The Guardian (G2), February 28th 2008
• Alan Travis, "Iraqi asylum seekers given deadline to go home or face destitution in UK." The Guardian, March 13th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/13/immigrationpolicy.immigration
• Rageh Omaar, "The story that isn't being told.", The Guardian, March 17th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/17/iraqandthemedia.iraq?gusrc=rss&feed=media
• Alan Travis (home affairs editor) "Chaos in Iraq sparks surge in EU asylum applications." The Guardian, March 18th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/18/iraq.immigration
• P. X. DE S. "Aznar asegura que ‘la situación en Irak es muy buena.’" El Pais, March 19th 2008
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/espana/Aznar/asegura/situacion/Irak/buena/elpepiesp/20080319elpepinac_7/Tes
• Hannah Godfrey, "From Baghdad to Britain." The Guardian (G2), March 20th 2008
• Ewen MacAskill, "Iraq, five years on." The Guardian, March 20th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/20/georgebush.usa
• Seumas Milne, "There must be a reckoning for this day of infamy." The Guardian, March 20th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/20/iraq
• Hans Blix, "A war of utter folly." The Guardian, March 20th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/20/iraq.usa
• Diane Taylor, "Airlift will bring 2,000 hand-picked Iraqis to new life in Britain." The Guardian, March 25th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/25/immigrationpolicy.immigration
• Hannah Godfrey, "Asylum seekers say expulsion flight ended in beating in Iraq." The Guardian, March 29th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/mar/29/immigration.immigrationpolicy?gusrc=rss&feed=politics
• Jamie Doward, "Anger as 50 Iraqi refugees are sent back.", The Guardian, March 30th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/30/immigrationpolicy.immigration
• Jonathan Steele, "In backing the Basra assault, the US has only helped Sadr." The Guardian, April 4th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/04/usa.iraq
• Reuters Bagdad, "Sadr urges million-strong march agains the US." The Guardian, April 4th 2008
• Seumas Milne, "Secret US plan for military future in Iraq." The Guardian, April 8th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/08/iraq.usa
“The unprovoked aggression launched by the US and Britain against Iraq five years ago today has already gone down across the world as, to borrow the words of President Roosevelt, ‘a day which will live in infamy’. Iraqis were promised freedom, democracy and prosperity. Instead (…) they have seen the physical and social destruction of their country, mass killing, tens of thousands thrown into jail without trial, rampant torture, an epidemic of sectarian terror attacks, pauperization, and the complete breakdown of basic services and supplies.”
Former head of UN inspections in Iraq in 2003, Hans Blix, annotates:
“The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a tragedy – for Iraq, for the US, for the UN, for truth and human dignity (…) The elimination of weapons of mass destruction was the declared main aim of the war (…) Responsibility for the war must rest, though, on what those launching it knew by March 2003. By then, Unmovic inspectors had carried out some 700 inspections at 500 sites without finding prohibited weapons. The contract that George Bush held up before Congress to show that Iraq was purchasing uranium oxide was proved to be a forgery. The allied powers were on thin ice, but they preferred to replace question marks with exclamation marks. They could not succeed in eliminating WMDs because they did not exist. Nor could they succeed in the declared aim to eliminate al-Qaida operators, because they were not in Iraq. They came later, attracted by the occupants.”
On this occasion, however, my efforts will not focus necessarily or exclusively in questioning the legality of this war - given that the invasion of Iraq indeed remains regarded as illegal not only in the eyes of the majority of “the UN Security Council, its secretary general, and the overwhelming weight of international legal opinion” , but also confirmed by the transcripts of the “Crawford Memo” . Instead, I will be looking at the aftermath of this unjustifiable aggression.
At the time this paper is being written, the dimension of this tragedy is reaching an epic scale: a conservative estimate of civilian deaths that ranges from hundred of thousands to over a million, and two million refugees driven from their homes in Iraq. And yet, according to official figures, only about one sixth of the Iraqis seeking asylum in the UK is allowed to remain .
By 2007 Britain was being urged by the UN to play a leading role in tackling the grave humanitarian crisis of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees by resettling some in the UK and by stopping the deportation of asylum seekers. The Guardian reports:
“(…)The UNHCR estimates that 40,000-50,000 people are fleeing Iraq every month, adding to an estimated two million refugees, most in Syria and Jordan.
"We believe that because of the UK's involvement in the Iraq conflict, the UK should be playing a leading role in addressing this humanitarian crisis," said Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Refugee Council in a joint open letter urging Mr Blair to adopt "a more generous, more principled, more coherent, and more far-sighted set of UK policies".
Britain approves just 12% of Iraqi asylum claims, compared with a 91% approval rate in Sweden, which has suspended forcible refugee returns.”
A year on, with no end to the carnage in Iraq in sight, these figures have almost doubled:
“The number of Iraqis applying for asylum across the EU almost doubled last year, rising from 19,375 to 38,286, reflecting the growing chaos in the country, according to UN figures released today.
The resurgence in the number of Iraqis fleeing across Europe comes as the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees says the Iraqi refugee crisis - with 4.5 million people uprooted by the conflict - continues to represent one of its biggest challenges.
For the second year in a row the UN's refugee agency says Iraq was the main source of asylum seekers in the EU during 2007, accounting for a fifth of all those claiming refugee status last year. The trend was mirrored in Britain where the number of Iraqis claiming asylum rose from 1,300 in 2006 to 2,075 last year.”
Britain response to the situation? Tightening the claim process. Indeed, immigration was a major electoral issue in the 2005 election campaigns and in an attempt to gain voter support, subsequent changes in British asylum policy have focused on restricting the admission of migrants to the UK.
The Guardian:
“Before the 2003 invasion, almost half of Iraqi asylum claims were successful. Since then, the recognition rate has fallen to an average of less than 3%. This is despite the fact that, throughout the war, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees has advised that Iraqi asylum seekers – particularly those from the central and southern areas – should be either recognized as refugees or provided with another form of protection. In the period preceding the invasion an average of 800 Iraqis were granted asylum each year in this country; since 2003 numbers have fallen to between five and 150, while applications have averaged about 1,500 per year during this period.”
However, despite the proven facts, the simplicity of my premise didn’t necessarily translate into an easy subject to tackle from an investigative perspective - beyond checking stats and sources that could translate into analytical trends, and eventually, fact-finding (let us pretend for a moment that the exposé quality of the piece could be left to a second plane), where is the story? And more importantly, what is the angle? With an unrealistic time constraint of six weeks, I set out to find the answer.
(…)
As a result of my research, and a compulsive and thorough consumption of both daily and archived independent news, two main narrative leads have emerged:
1. A common denominator of ill treatment of asylum seekers (on their own account) by the Home Office. The following case study may help illustrating this point:
“Two Iraqis, Fazzel Abdula Ahmad and Sarwar Rahid Mohammad, have been deported to the Kurdistan region in the past week, according to refugee groups. More than 90 Iraqi Kurds have been returned since August 2005.
Initially the deportees were sent in large groups on military flights from RAF Brize Norton, via Cyprus, to the new airfield near the Kurdish city of Irbil. They complained about being handcuffed and were ordered to wear flak jackets as they flew over Iraq.
Like others more recently returned to northern Iraq, Ahmad and Mohammad were given tickets for a commercial flight on Royal Jordanian Airlines. Once in the capital, Amman, deportees are transferred on to a civilian flight to Irbil.
“Iraq, including Kurdistan, is dangerous. The UK government must stop forcibly deporting Iraqi Kurds," said Dashty Jamal of the International Federation of Iraqi Refugeees. "Fazzel's wife and child are currently missing in Iraq and he fears his life will be in danger.”
One Iraqi refugee, Solyman Rashed, who agreed after 15 months in a UK detention centre to voluntarily return to northern Iraq, was killed in a car attack in the city of Kirkuk.
Another refugee, Burhan Namiq, 28, complained in an open letter after being deported 18 months ago back to his native Sulaimaniya in Kurdistan: "I sought asylum in the United Kingdom, stayed and lived there without committing any crime for two years, but you did not accept my claim for asylum.
“That decision made me depressed, isolated and forced me to consider suicide. The treatment in detention and the deportation can only be described as inhuman and humiliating.
“Only two days after my removal I was sent to hospital. I had suffered a heart attack due to depression and the inhuman treatment I received whilst in your 'care'.””
2. Despite escalation of conflict in Iraq (at the time this article is going to print, a confidential draft agreement covering the future of US forces in Iraq, passed to the Guardian, allegedly shows that provision is being made for an open-ended military presence in the country ), “we are being subjected to a renewed barrage of spin about the success of the US surge in turning the country around, quelling the violence and opening the way to a sunlit future :”
Former Spanish Prime Minister and Bush acolyte Jose Maria Aznar declared to BBC Radio 4 on March 18th 2008 that the situation in Iraq is very good .
On March 19th 2008 George W Bush proclaims the Iraq war a “major strategic victory” in the “war on terror.” The Guardian reports:
“George Bush marked the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion yesterday with an uncompromising speech in which he described the war as noble, necessary and just, and claimed there was now an unprecedented Arab uprising under way against Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida.
(…)‘Five years into this battle, there is an understandable debate over whether the war was worth fighting, whether the fight is worth winning, and whether we can win it,’ he said. ‘The answers are clear to me: removing Sadam Hussein from power was the right decision – and this is a fight Americans must win. Because we acted, the world is better and the United States of America is safer.’
(…)‘For the terrorists, Iraq was supposed to be the place where al-Qaida rallied Arab masses to drive America out. Instead, Iraq has become the place where Arabs joined with Americans to drive al-Qaida out. In Iraq, we are witnessing the first large-sclae Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden… An the significance of this development cannot be overstated.’”
March 13th. According to leaked Home Office correspondence seen and disclosed by The Guardian, the British Government says Iraq is now safe despite the conflict. More than 1,400 rejected Iraqi refugees could be given a deadline to go home and be asked to sign a waiver agreeing the government will take no responsibility for what happens to them or their families once they return to Iraq - or face destitution in Britain by being refused the minimal welfare support they are currently on. The decision by the home secretary Jacqui Smith to declare that it is safe to send refugees back to Iraq comes after more than 78 people have been killed in incidents across the country on that week alone.
Confronting this blatant official deceit with the voices of those Iraqis trapped on both sides of the fence of the asylum process and the “reaffirmed realities that have been proved, and proved again, but just as doggedly denied by those in power, forcing us to live trapped between two narratives of present history” will be the ultimate goal of this film.
© Jose M Barea Velazquez, April 2008
Seumas Milne, "There must be a reckoning for this day of infamy." The Guardian, March 20th 2008.
Hans Blix, " A war of utter folly." The Guardian, Thursday March 20th 2008.
Seumas Milne, "There must be a reckoning for this day of infamy." The Guardian, March 20th 2008.
Ernesto Ekaizer, "Bush avisó a Aznar de que estaría en Bagdad en marzo con o sin resolución de la ONU." El Pais, 25th September 2007
Facts and figures enclosed in the appendix.
Ian Black (Middle East editor) "Take more Iraqi refugees, UN tells Britain." The Guardian, April 17th 2007
Alan Travis (home affairs editor) "Chaos in Iraq sparks surge in EU asylum applications." The Guardian, Tuesday March 18th 2008
Hannah Godfrey, "From Baghdad to Britain." The Guardian (G2) March 20th 2008
Alan Travis, "The treatment is humiliating." (case study) The Guardian March 13th 2008
Seumas Milne, "Secret US plan for military future in Iraq." The Guardian, April 8th 2008
Seumas Milne, "There must be a reckoning for this day of infamy." The Guardian, March 20th 2008.
P. X. DE S. "Aznar asegura que ‘la situación en Irak es muy buena.’" El Pais, March 19th 2008
Ewen MacAskill (in Washington) "Bush: The battle in Iraq is noble, it is necessary and it is just." The Guardian, March 20th 2008
Alan Travis (home affairs editor) "Iraqi asylum seekers given deadline to go home or face destitution in UK." The Guardian March 13th 2008
Mark Danner, "The Moment Has Come to Get Rid of Saddam" New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 17. November 8th, 2007
Selected bibliography/webography
• Ernesto Ekaizer, "Bush avisó a Aznar de que estaría en Bagdad en marzo con o sin resolución de la ONU." El Pais, September 25th 2007
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Bush/aviso/Aznar/estaria/Bagdad/marzo/resolucion/ONU/elpepuint/20070925elpepuint_17/Tes
• Fred Attewil, "Judge orders return to UK of 15-year-old Iraqi refugee." The Guardian, December 19th 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/dec/19/immigration.politics
• Aida Edemariam, "The true cost of war (Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz counts the true cost of the Iraq war)", The Guardian (G2), February 28th 2008
• Alan Travis, "Iraqi asylum seekers given deadline to go home or face destitution in UK." The Guardian, March 13th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/13/immigrationpolicy.immigration
• Rageh Omaar, "The story that isn't being told.", The Guardian, March 17th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/17/iraqandthemedia.iraq?gusrc=rss&feed=media
• Alan Travis (home affairs editor) "Chaos in Iraq sparks surge in EU asylum applications." The Guardian, March 18th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/18/iraq.immigration
• P. X. DE S. "Aznar asegura que ‘la situación en Irak es muy buena.’" El Pais, March 19th 2008
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/espana/Aznar/asegura/situacion/Irak/buena/elpepiesp/20080319elpepinac_7/Tes
• Hannah Godfrey, "From Baghdad to Britain." The Guardian (G2), March 20th 2008
• Ewen MacAskill, "Iraq, five years on." The Guardian, March 20th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/20/georgebush.usa
• Seumas Milne, "There must be a reckoning for this day of infamy." The Guardian, March 20th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/20/iraq
• Hans Blix, "A war of utter folly." The Guardian, March 20th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/20/iraq.usa
• Diane Taylor, "Airlift will bring 2,000 hand-picked Iraqis to new life in Britain." The Guardian, March 25th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/25/immigrationpolicy.immigration
• Hannah Godfrey, "Asylum seekers say expulsion flight ended in beating in Iraq." The Guardian, March 29th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/mar/29/immigration.immigrationpolicy?gusrc=rss&feed=politics
• Jamie Doward, "Anger as 50 Iraqi refugees are sent back.", The Guardian, March 30th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/30/immigrationpolicy.immigration
• Jonathan Steele, "In backing the Basra assault, the US has only helped Sadr." The Guardian, April 4th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/04/usa.iraq
• Reuters Bagdad, "Sadr urges million-strong march agains the US." The Guardian, April 4th 2008
• Seumas Milne, "Secret US plan for military future in Iraq." The Guardian, April 8th 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/08/iraq.usa
Friday 18 April 2008
On Direct Cinema
“Portraying the on-screen lies that betray the truth” is the aim of the Cinéma Vérité movement as originally envisioned by the French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch. Accepting all film practice as artifice and vindicating the teachings of Dziga Vertov and the kinopravda tradition forty years on, Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin set up a film experiment by the name of “Chronicle of a summer” (“Chronique d'un été”, France, 1961) as a means to discuss whether or not it is possible to act sincerely in front of a camera. Filming a cast of real life individuals and later showing them the compiled footage to discuss the level of reality that they thought the movie obtained, “Chronicle of a summer” illustrated how both the presence of the camera and Rouch’s own may serve as a catalyst that makes the subjects of the film more self-revealing. Rouch explains:“The presence of the camera is a kind of passport that opens all doors and makes every kind of scandal possible. The camera deforms, but not from the moment that it becomes an accomplice. At that point it has the possibility of doing something I couldn't do if the camera wasn't there: it becomes a kind of psychoanalytic stimulant, which lets people do things they wouldn't otherwise do.”
As a result, Rouch would endorse the view that film has the power “to reveal, with doubts, a fictional part of all of us, which for me is the most real part of an individual”, highlighting the elusive nature of truth in a medium where reality must constantly be negotiated with its representation. This essay will examine Rouch’s claim with reference to two documentary films within the Cinéma Vérité framework, Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies” (USA, 1967) and Abbas Kiarostami’s “Homework” (“Mashq-e Shab”, Iran, 1989), additionally assessing whether documentaries force their subjects to “act up” in front of the camera. We must, however, look into the idiosyncrasies of the Cinéma Vérité movement first.
Documentary experienced one of its major revolutions during the 1960s with the advent of lightweight 16mm cameras and portable sound recorders. Replacing the awkward and virtually immobile 35mm cameras and oversized tape recorders used up until then for more manageable equipment, practitioners were suddenly able to shoot with an ease of access and immediacy they could never have dreamt of before. At the same time, the increased speed of the new 16mm stocks meant that less light was required in order to obtain an acceptable image, so film lights could be dispensed with, and most situations filmed in natural, available light . This facilitated spontaneity and freedom in filming that paved the way for a new aesthetic in film identified by the many adjectives that have become common currency in documentary today: rough, grainy, hand-held , on location.
Accommodating values from the Italian Neo-realist movement and kinopravda credentials , the European materialization of this new aesthetic took the name of Cinéma Vérité (literally Film Truth) and was championed by Rouch and Morin, their interpretation of film typically involving active interviews and interventions by the filmmakers, thus embracing the distorting effect that the presence of the camera has on the reality which it is trying to capture. Rouch comments on:
“(…) When you have a microphone and when you have a camera aimed at people, there is, all of a sudden, a phenomenon that takes place because people are being recorded: they behave very differently than they would if they were not being recorded. But what has always seemed very strange to me is that, contrary to what one might think, when people are being recorded, the reactions that they have are always more sincere than those they have when they are not being recorded. The fact of being recorded gives these people a public.”
Across the Atlantic, however, Rouch’s invitation for his subjects to act up their deepest inner-selves would be frowned upon, as a parallel development in Cinéma Vérité aesthetics took place: Direct Cinema .
Led by Richard Leacock, Robert Drew, Donn A. Pennebaker, Albert and David Maysles and Frederick Wiseman, the American schism was more concerned with the recording of events in which the subject and audience become unaware of the camera's presence. Furthermore, they would also find the term Cinéma Vérité too pretentious, adhering instead to the label Direct Cinema . Arguing for an observational, objective, “fly on the wall” approach that does not modify the action being filmed, Leacock would sum up Direct Cinema’s differences in belief with Rouch’s as follows:
“We find that the degree to which the camera changes the situation is mostly due to the nature of the person filming it. You can make your presence known, or you can act in such a way as not to affect them. Also, of course, it depends on the intensity of what’s happening to them. But we don’t think that it affects people very much, at least I don’t. Let me add that, of course, it affects them in Jean Rouch’s films, since the only thing that’s happening to them is the fact that they’re being filmed. There’s nothing else to think about. How can they ever forget it?”
However, in spite of parting with the Europeans over the questions of filmmaker interference and branding, both schools of thought would ultimately come to represent faces of the same coin, the terms often used interchangeably to refer to an understanding of the documentary practice indebted with “the real” and “the truth”. In Bill Nichol’s view, a truth understood inevitably as “the truth of an encounter rather than the absolute or untampered truth” and subject to the politics of epistemology and representation - the minimized encounter of the Direct Cinema approach still an encounter, and its objectivity a chimera, for documentary is not just about recording what is there, but also about perspective, interpretation of the facts and narrative; about selecting, presenting and editing. Nichols annotates:
“We see how the filmmaker and subject negotiate a relationship, how they act toward one another, what forms of power and control come into play, and what levels of revelation or rapport stem from this specific form of encounter.”
This is an argument also posited throughout theoretician Stella Bruzzi’s work. Bruzzi comments on:
“Documentaries are a negotiation between filmmaker and reality, and at heart performance (…) The traditional concept of documentary as striving to represent reality as faithfully as possible is predicated upon the realist assumption that the production process must be disguised, as was the case with Direct Cinema. Conversely, [new performative] documentaries herald a different notion of documentary truth that acknowledges the construction and artificiality of even the non fiction film.”
So how do we work around the inevitable falsification or subjectification such representation entails ? Nichols elaborates:
“[Documentary] makes the stuff of social reality visible and audible in a distinctive way, according to the acts of selection and arrangement carried out by the filmmaker. It gives a sense of what we understand reality itself to have been, or what it is now, or of what it may become. Documentary films also convey truths if we decide they do.”
It is therefore up to us to assess documentary claims and assertions. Nichols suggests that the "truth" of a film can be understood in many ways, categorizing how reality is being negotiated in different modes, a relatively wide spectrum of methods that he defines as “basic ways of organizing texts in relation to certain recurrent features or conventions” that may help us asses whether the truths conveyed are worthy of our belief. It would be useful to review briefly what these conventions imply.
Nichols distinguishes six modes of representation around which most documentary texts are structured: poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive and performative. The poetic mode stresses mood, tone, and affect much more than displays of knowledge or acts of persuasion, and opens up the possibility of alternative forms of knowledge to the straightforward transfer of information, the prosecution of particular arguments or points of view, or the presentation of reasoned propositions about problems in need of solution. Usually associated with the 1920s and Modernism, examples of this mode can be found in Joris Ivens’s “Rain” (“Regen”, Netherlands, 1929), but also in more recent films like Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil” (France, 1982).
The expository documentary mode arises from the dissatisfaction with the distracting, entertainment qualities of the fiction film, emphasizing the impression of objectivity and judgment. Characteristically mediated by a voice-of-God narration and the use of images as illustration, this mode seeks to disclose information about the historical world itself and to see that world afresh, yet through methods that may seem over didactic. This type of documentary is best represented by the works of Grierson and Flaherty (e.g. “Industrial Britain”, England, 1931), where editing serves to establish and maintain rhetorical continuity more than spatial or temporal continuity, but also by Luis Buñuel’s “Land without Bread” (“Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan”, Spain, 1933), where counterpoint, irony, satire and strange juxtapositions serve to establish new metaphors that the filmmaker wishes to propose.
Observational documentary arises both from the availability of mobile cameras and lighter sound equipment and dissatisfaction with the moralizing quality of the expository documentary. Observational filmmakers aim to record inconspicuously what people do when they are not explicitly addressing the camera, thus leaving the social actors free to act and the documentaries free to record without interacting with one another. On the other hand, this requires a disciplined detachment from the events being filmed and restricts the filmmaker to the present moment. We find examples of this approach in the works of Leacock-Pennebaker (“Don’t look back”, USA, 1967), Maysles brothers (“Salesman”, USA, 1968) and Frederick Wiseman’s (“Titicut Follies”, USA, 1967)
Participatory documentary, also referred to as interactive documentary, also arises from the availability of mobile equipment, but expresses a desire to make the filmmaker’s perspective more evident. Documentarists engage with the individuals and situations being filmed directly, while not reverting to classic exposition. Interview styles and interventionist tactics arise, allowing the filmmaker to participate more actively in present events. Representative of this mode are the films of Jean Rouch (“Chronicle of a summer”, France, 1961) and Nick Broomfield (“Kurt & Courtney”, UK, 1998)
Reflexive documentary, the most self-aware of modes, questions the very documentary form, engaging actively with the issues of realism and representation, using the same devices as other documentaries but setting them on edge so that the viewer’s attention is drawn to the devices as well as the effect. Examples of this approach can be found in Dziga Vertov’s “Man with the movie camera” (USSR, 1929) and Errol Morris’ “The thin blue line” (USA, 1988)
Finally, the performative mode is defined by the desire to stress the subjective aspects of a classically objective discourse. Like the poetic mode, the performative mode raises questions about what is knowledge. What counts as understanding? What besides factual information goes into our understanding of the world? Nichols argues that performative documentaries primarily address us emotionally rather than pointing us to the factual world we hold in common , acknowledging the subjective aspects of documentary, like Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” (“Nuit et brouillard”, France, 1955) With a commentary by Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol, “Night and Fog” is not a historical account of the Holocaust but instead a subjective account of it.
However, Nichols also reminds us that, although this short summary may give the impression of a linear chronology or even an implicit evolution toward greater complexity and self-awareness, these modes have all been present from early in the history of documentary. Moreover, they often coexist or tend to be combined and altered within individual films. Let us now return to the question that opens this paper and contextualize Rouch’s claim in light of these categorizations, assessing how it may apply to two specific examples representative of differing views within the documentary mode spectrum: Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies” and Abbas Kiarostami’s “Homework”.
Frederick Wiseman’s 1967 observational documentary “Titicut Follies” is a stark and graphic exposé of the conditions that existed at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts. As an instructor in criminal law, Wiseman had taken his students to Bridgwater, and he says the idea for the film came from the shock of what he saw. The film, the first in a series about American institutional life, documents the various ways the inmates are treated by the guards, social workers and psychiatrists .
Wiseman’s style is non-interventionist. Like Leacock, whenever unable to adopt the fly-on-the-wall etiquette of Direct Cinema, Wiseman disagrees with Rouch over the effects the presence of the camera may have on the reality being filmed, arguing that people do not significantly alter their behaviour for the camera, and that “if they are at all made self-conscious by its presence, they will tend to fall back on a behaviour that is comfortable ‘rather than increase the discomfort by trying out new roles’” . Rejecting Rouch’s belief that documentary may somehow persuade its subjects to ‘act up’ in front of the camera, Wiseman’s observational approach, seemingly that of the uninvolved onlooker, certainly honours its Direct Cinema credentials: the role of the camera in “Titicut Follies” is overtly detached, inconspicuous, scientific .
Framed by scenes of the annual variety show organized and performed by the staff and inmates at Bridgewater (people do perform in this instance, but that does not necessarily invalidate the observational method), the film documents a series of activities and procedures at the prison, including psychiatric interviews and hearings, the force-feeding of an inmate who refuses to eat, daily routines such as strip searches, bathing and shaving, a birthday party and a funeral.
Rejecting didacticism, the opening titles in “Titicut Follies” give us little indication as to what the subject will be. Without a narrator or voice-over to guide us thru the material, we are forced to find the structural logic of the film by ourselves. This open style of observational filmmaking where the viewers are left to contemplate the film and its implications without a defined perspective has led to some criticism. Rouch dismisses Wiseman’s unwillingness to push his point of view:
“I would like [Wiseman] to say something, say what the thesis is (…) In “Titicut Follies” there isn’t any [guiding hand], it’s a certified report, which could perhaps be interpreted as a cynical and sadomasochistic report.”
But yet, appearances can certainly be deceiving. The film is carefully edited and structured to advance its maker’s thesis. Wiseman spent approximately six weeks shooting on location, but eleven months in the cutting room shaping his material. Peter Mathews comments on Wiseman’s approach:
“While there’s a powerful illusion of objectivity, the material has in fact been shrewdly selected and slanted to make an anti-authoritarian case. It isn’t so far removed from Grierson’s didacticism.”
Furthermore, the role of the camera may transcend Wiseman’s expectations, proving Rouch’s claim right on a number of occasions: “The guard holding the inmate as he is being force-fed looks directly at the camera as if to indicate ‘What can I do?’” ; An elderly man sings “Chinatown, My Chinatown” and other inmates play trombones or perform explicitly for the film crew; Likewise, the camera follows a naked ex-schoolteacher (Jim) into his cell. Aware of the camera’s presence and trying to cover his genitals with his hands, Jim’s returns the camera’s direct gaze by holding his and we become painfully aware of the camera’s intrusive nature; Similarly, a young inmate (Vladimir), lucidly arguing that he came to Bridgewater “for observation”, often takes advantage of the filming to state his case, frequently saying “I want to say this to camera”. Aware that his reproduction on celluloid was something valuable to the filmmaker, he would refuse to sign a release form until portions of the film were shown to members of the federal government or until his deportation out of America and back to another country arranged.
Do these subjects act up for the camera? Perhaps we could only conclude that “[Brigdewater’s] inmates are forever on stage” .
Constructed almost exclusively from intimidating one to one pupil interviews about the state of their homework, Abbas Kiarostami’s 1989 documentary “Homework” is reminiscent of Rouch, developing from the premise that “we can never get close to the truth except through lying.” Peter Matthews annotates:
“The inaugural fiction is the director's own, and entails a cunning manipulation of the action. In the nature of an experiment, Chronicle of a Summer sets up and choreographs an artificial situation wherein hand-picked strangers are brought together and made to interact with Rouch, his accomplice Edgar Morin and each other (…) Kiarostami gambles for similar high stakes in Homework.”
According to Kiarostami, Homework is not a film, but rather a filmed inquiry motivated by the Iranian educational problems his own children brought home every night from school. A group of small boys on the way to school, overtly curious about the camera Kiarostami makes no effort to hide, approach him; The headmaster of the school where he wants to film asks him what the film is about:
“The film is just based on an impression. I thought to get the camera over here to do some observation; We are going to find about other parents, other children and their views; I’d rather say it’s not a movie in the usual sense, it’s a research work. It’s a pictorial research on student’s homework.”
Kiarostami adds: "But you can't tell until the film's made", in Matthew’s view, a pledge that Homework won't deliver sure answers so much as pose questions - and by this means, sneak up on some truth. To some extent, the truth and lies of a society and its educational system that claim to teach the students but in reality bullies and brutalizes them.
The initial exterior shots transition into a cell like room, where we see the camera crew setting up to roll. Like Vertov and film-truth, Kiarostami bares the filmmaking devices and makes us conscious of the mechanisms at work within the film. This leads to the film interviews: Backs to the wall, framed in harshly lit close ups, visibly ill-treated children face both Kiarostami’s and the camera’s unsympathetic, freezing, blank stare: “Have you done your homework? Why don’t you do your homework on time?” Matthews comments on:
“The questions he asks each child are elementary, almost trite; but if they suggest at the outset a catechism for toddlers, they end up resembling an inquisition. We hear the same monotonous litany of excuses: teachers pile on an impossibly heavy load, siblings are unavailable to help, mothers are busy cooking, fathers are illiterate. Behind the children's inarticulate apologies, we can read a whole culture of oppression where adults, themselves ground down by overwork, worry and powerlessness, visit their frustrations on the lowest in the pecking order.”
“Do you prefer cartoons or homework?” Identifying Kiarostami with the authorities - teachers, parents, siblings - that brutalize them, they all answer what they believe is expected of them: “homework”. Only then we begin to grasp the truth concealed by the weight of such lie.
© Jose M Barea Velazquez, May 2007
After Peter Matthews, “A little learning” (BFI Sight and Sound, June 2002)
Rouch shares Vertov’s belief that the camera is able to reveal deeper levels of truth about the world than the “imperfect human eye”. In his own words, “I’m one of the people responsible for this phrase [Cinéma Vérité] and it’s really in homage to Dziga Vertov, who completely invented the kind of film we do today. It was a cinema of lies, but he believed simply – and I agree with him – that the camera eye is more perspicacious and more accurate than the human eye. The camera eye has an infallible memory, and the filmmaker’s eye is a multiple one, divided…” (Jean Rouch interviewed by G. Roy-Leven in 1969, Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary”, Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998, p. 265)
G. Roy Levin, “Documentary explorations; 15 interviews with film-makers” (1st ed.), Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1971, p.136
After Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins’, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary”, Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998, p. 249 (“The Grain of Truth”)
Rouch annotates: “…the last piece of good luck I had was when I made my first films about Nigeria. I left with an amateur cameraman’s manual, and I had the good luck to lose my tripod at the end of a week, and was forced to work without a tripod.” (Jean Rouch interviewed by G. Roy-Leven in 1969, Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary”, Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998, p. 264)
The French New Wave, and indeed, the Cinéma Vérité movement, celebrated both Vertov’s teachings and Italian Neorealism of the 1940s, incorporating much of them into their own movement: filming distinctly with non-professional actors, shooting almost exclusively on location, its directors ever keen to take their handheld cameras into the streets in an attempt to explore and experiment with the medium and find their stories in the lives of ordinary people and portrait “life as it is”.
Jean Rouch interviewed by James Blue, from Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins’, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary”, Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998, p. 268 (“The Grain of Truth”)
To this day, Cinéma Vérité has taken on several names worldwide: Uncontrolled Cinema, Observational Cinema, or Direct Cinema. However, I will argue that all of these terms are interchangeable in practice, as they all share a common ground of "truth" and are the by-product of the same major advancements in technology. Moreover, their different filming modes often coexist, overlap or are combined and altered within individual films.
Formally though, it has become common practice to use Cinema Verite (no italics or accent marks) as the covering term for these many variants, Direct Cinema as the somewhat narrower term usually used to refer only to the Anglo-Canadian-American manifestation of the movement.
All of them significantly credited in Richard Leacock’s “Primary" (USA, 1960), a portrait the 1960 primary election between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States. Produced by Robert Drew, shot by Leacock himself and Albert Maysles, and edited by D. A. Pennebaker, the film is yet another breakthrough in documentary film style and established what has since become the standard style of video reporting through the use of mobile cameras and lighter sound equipment, obtaining greater intimacy than was ever possible with the older, more classical techniques of documentary filmmaking.
It is worth noting that, ironically, in a letter of application to the Fifth International Film Festival, Wiseman described “Titicut Follies” (USA, 1967) as done “in the Cinéma Vérité” style. (26 April 1967, exhibit 44 in Commonwealth v. Wiseman, as quoted in Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson's, “Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman”, Southern Illinois University Press, 1989, p.329)
Richard Leacock interviewed by Mark Shivas in March 1963 for RTF (Radio Television Fraçaise), as quoted in Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins’, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary”, Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998, p. 254 (“The Grain of Truth”)
Bill Nichols, “Introduction to Documentary” (Indiana University Press, 2001. p. 118)
Bill Nichols, “Introduction to Documentary” (Indiana University Press, 2001. p. 118)
Stella Bruzzi, "New documentary: a critical introduction" (Routledge, London, 2000. p.186)
After Stella Bruzzi’s "New documentary: a critical introduction" (Routledge, London, 2000. p.187)
Bill Nichols, “Introduction to documentary” (Indiana University Press, 2001)
Bill Nichols, “Representing Reality” (Indiana University Press, 1991. p. 32)
Bill Nichols, “Introduction to Documentary” (Indiana University Press, 2001. p. 132)
The film's release was banned outside of the field of education in the United States from 1967-1992 by a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling that, since it was filmed in a hospital, it violated the patients' rights to privacy. The polemics around this are unfortunately out of the scope of this paper. On the subject, I recommend Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson’s “Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman”, Southern Illinois University Press, 1989, chapter 2: “Documentary dilemmas: the trials of Titicut Follies.”
After Barry Keith and Jeannette Sloniowski's “Documenting the Documentary”, Wayne State University Press, 1998, p. 242 (“Ethnography in the first person”, by Barry Keith Grant; quote from interview with Barry Keith Grant)
Wiseman himself regards his own documentaries as a “natural history of the way we live”(as quoted in Frederick Wiseman and Barry Keith Grant’s “5 Films by Frederick Wiseman”, University of California Press, 2006, p.3, after David Eame’s “Watching Wiseman Watch”, New York Time Magazine, October 2, 1977, p.97); His choice of cameraman and co-director for “Titicut Follies”, ethnographic filmmaker John Marshall, helps defining Wiseman’s approach to Bridgewater to some extent as that of a detached anthropologist.
Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson, “Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman”, Southern Illinois University Press, 1989, p.35 (After G. Roy Levin, “Documentary explorations; 15 interviews with film-makers” (1st ed.), Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1971, p.141-142)
Peter Matthews, “A little learning” (BFI Sight and Sound, June 2002)
After Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson’s “Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman”, Southern Illinois University Press, 1989, p.40
Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson, “Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman”, Southern Illinois University Press, 1989, p.24
Barry Keith and Jeannette Sloniowski, “Documenting the Documentary”, Wayne State University Press, 1998, p. 243 (“Ethnography in the first person”, by Barry Keith Grant; quote from interview with Barry Keith Grant)
Kiarostami has said: "My son is critical that I keep lying to people (...) in cinema, by fabricating lies we may never reach the fundamental truth, but we will always be on our way to it. We can never get close to the truth except through lying."
“A little learning” (BFI Sight and Sound, June 2002)
“A little learning” (BFI Sight and Sound, June 2002)
Bibliography
• Bill Nichols, “Representing Reality” (Indiana University Press, 1991)
• Bill Nichols, “Introduction to Documentary” (Indiana University Press, 2001)
• Stella Bruzzi, "New documentary: a critical introduction" (Routledge, London, 2000)
• Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson, “Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman” (Southern Illinois University Press, 1989)
• Barry Keith and Jeannette Sloniowski, “Documenting the Documentary” (Wayne State University Press, 1998)
• Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary” (Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998)
• G. Roy Levin, “Documentary explorations: 15 interviews with film-makers” (Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1971)
• Frederick Wiseman and Barry Keith Grant, “5 Films by Frederick Wiseman” (University of California Press, 2006)
• Peter Matthews, “A little learning” (BFI Sight and Sound, June 2002)
Selected Filmography
• Dziga Vertov, “Chelovek s kinoapparatom” (AKA “The Man With The Movie Camera”. USSR, 1929)
• Luis Buñuel, “Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan” (AKA “Land without bread”. Spain, 1933)
• Roberto Rossellini, “Roma, città aperta” (AKA “Roma, open city”. Italy, 1945)
• Vittorio de Sica, “Ladri di biciclette” (AKA “Bicycle Thieves”. Italy, 1948)
• Alain Resnais, “Nuit et brouillard” (AKA “Night and Fog”, France, 1955)
• Richard Leacock, “Primary” (USA, 1960)
• Edgar Morin, Jean Rouch, “Chronique d'un été” (AKA “Chronicle of a Summer”. France, 1961)
• Frederick Wiseman, “Titicut Follies” (USA, 1967)
• Albert Maysles & David Maysles, “Salesman” (USA, 1969)
• Albert Maysles, David Maysles & Charlotte Zwerin, “Gimmie Shelter” (USA, 1970)
• Chris Marker, “Sans soleil” (France, 1983)
• Abbas Kiarostami, “Khaneh-ye dust kojast?” (AKA “Where is the friend’s house?”. Iran, 1987)
• Errol Morris, “The thin blue line” (USA, 1988)
• Abbas Kiarostami, “Mashq-e Shab” (AKA “Homework”. Iran, 1989)
• Nick Broomfield, “Kurt & Courtney” (UK, 1998)
On Vertov´s "Man with the movie camera"
As insurrection broke out in Russia in October 1917 in the form of the Bolshevik Revolution, cinema, still a young aesthetic form free from any bourgeois associations and capable of moving illiterate and intellectual audiences alike, was to find a new purpose: propaganda. So when Lenin hailed it as the greatest of the arts, the moving image found itself transformed overnight into the most versatile instrument for the new regime. With the backing of the new state, filmmakers (mostly young, talented and enthusiastic avant-gardists riding on the momentum of Constructivism: Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Vertov, to name but a few) would depart from Moscow in the carriages of agitprop trains to remote corners of the country to educate and spread the word of the Party.However, some of these filmmakers will also transcend the party line and penetrate with their cameras into the immediate reality of Russian life itself, documenting the fast paced and uneasy changes of the first tier of the Twentieth century - a genuine aim to claim the real potentially at odds with later impositions of the apparatchiks. This essay will examine Dziga Vertov’s “The Man with the Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, USSR 1929)” in those circumstances, providing an account of Vertov’s ensuing journey paving the path for future filmmakers, and weighing up the political intentions of the film as much as evaluating its contributions to the development of the documentary film form. But let us first look into its precedents.
It should be noted that the early films of the Soviets, both factual and fiction, did not differ significantly from those of their predecessors. Ironically, only after a methodical study of the American model, particularly the work of D.W. Griffith , did Soviet cinema start to live up to its revolutionary credentials. Yet, even though we must credit Griffith with the first deliberate editing of pictures, it is the re-evaluation of his techniques and even the iconoclast approach of the Russian experimentalist current brought by the Revolution that would allow for the development and imminent conception of the dynamic cinema of the 20s.
By 1919 Lev Kuleshov had already started to make fundamental experiments to push the use of montage, and formulated what has come to be known as the “K” effect:
“From old films I took shots of the actor Mozhukhin and edited them with various other shots. At first, I had Mozhukhin seeming to sit still in jail and then he was gladdened by the sun, the landscape and the freedom which he found. In another combination I had Mozhukhin sitting in the same position, in the same attitude, and looking at a half-naked woman. In another combination he looked at a child’s coffin – there were many different combinations. And in all those cases, so far as the expression on Mozhukhin’s face was concerned, it had the very same significance which I gave it in my editing.”
Kuleshov’s research leads to the conclusion that cinema, like any other language, is made up of individual fragments, meaningless in isolation, and that it is by assembling these fragments that we can communicate and convey a message. It is therefore not just the content of the images that is important, but also their juxtaposition. A young and extravagant medical student, poet and musician will follow Kuleshov’s footsteps, endorsing (whenever not paraphrasing) these findings: Dziga Vertov. Like Kuleshov, Vertov was also interested in montage and the scientific investigation of the abstract properties of art.
Vertov, born Denis Arkadevich Kaufman in Bialystok in 1896 (he would later on style himself after this Futurist pseudonym that loosely translates as “spinning top”) was the oldest of three brothers that would leave their own mark in the history of cinema: Mikkhail Kaufman would work as Vertov’s very man with a movie camera; Boris Kaufman, separated of his siblings during the Revolution, would be educated in France, where he shot “À propos de Nice” (France, 1930) for Jean Vigo. However, it would be Vertov, a militant and diligent theorist, who would primarily change our current understanding of documentary and factual filmmaking. In retrospective, he explains:
“From 1918 on we studied film writing, or how to write with a camera. We were ignorant, and suffered from the absence of a film-alphabet. Back then we attempted to create that alphabet.”
Vertov’s alphabet was to be written on newsreel celluloid over the harsh years marked by the Russian Civil War (1918 to 1921) and the short-lived period of intellectual freedom brought by Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), a policy Vertov disliked and was critical of as it temporarily abandoned communism, encouraged commercial film production and promoted the import of cheap foreign melodramas, but also a policy that nonetheless approved of experimentation and liberal artistic expression.
Shortly after establishing, directing and editing the weekly newsreel Kinonedielia (1918-19), Vertov and his acolytes, whom he named “the kinoks” (namely his brother and cameraman Mikhail and his wife and editor Elizaveta Svilova) would experiment with and promote the concepts of “Kino-Pravda”, or “Film-truth” (materialized in the reportage series by the same name during the 1920s) and “Kino-eye”, the pillars of his own film-making dogma, and indeed those of “The Man with The Movie Camera”. Let’s evaluate these two pillars in detail.
1. Kino-Pravda
Vertov’s convictions develop from a vehement and total rejection of all acted cinema and the theatre (a position that will gain him, in consequence, considerable hostility amongst the fiction filmmakers of his generation, above all Eisenstein). He elaborates:
“To intoxicate and suggest – the essential method of the fiction film approximates it to a religious influence, and makes it possible after a certain time to keep a man in a permanent state of over-excited unconsciousness… Musical shows, theatrical and cine-theatrical performances and so on above all act upon the subconscious of the spectator or listener, distorting his protesting consciousness in very possible way.”
His driving “Kino-Pravda” vision was to capture fragments of raw actuality unawares, though “not filming life unawares for the sake of the unaware, but in order to show people without masks, without makeup, to catch them thru the eye of the camera in a moment when they are not acting, to read their thoughts, laid bare by the camera.” Nonetheless, this film “truth” remains an elusive concept and, by definition, even a contradiction in terms, inevitably raising that question of what do we appreciate as truth and how can it be achieved when a camera and a point of view (both physical and ideological) are involved. The American theoretician of documentary film Bill Nichols annotates:
“As "film truth," the idea emphasizes that this is the truth of an encounter rather than the absolute or untampered truth. We see how the filmmaker and subject negotiate a relationship, how they act toward one another, what forms of power and control come into play, and what levels of revelation or rapport stem from this specific form of encounter.”
Both John Grierson and the British documentary tradition and Samuel Brody’s Worker’s Film and Photo League in the United States will embrace this principle, an understanding of the real which, isolated of the easy propaganda label, we have also come to expect in the documentary form today: an appreciation of real life captured by the camera, focused on everyday experiences, yet in perspective. In Vertov’s case, this perspective is in tune with the spirit of the Revolution, and understandably shuns bourgeois concerns.
2. The Kino-eye
Unrepentant of his Futurist baggage, Vertov would in addition stress his belief in the supremacy of what he came to describe as the “kino-eye”, or the cult of the camera apparatus, more so when combined with the editing process. In his own words, the “kino-eye” was conceived as “’what the eye does not see’, as the microscope and telescope of time, as telescopic camera lenses, as the X-ray eye”. He annotates the following on his 1923 theoretical manifesto, “The Council of Three”:
“The main and essential thing is:
The sensory exploration of the world thru film.
We therefore take as the point of departure the use of the camera as a kino-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space. The kino-eye lives and moves in time and space; it gathers and records impressions in a manner wholly different from that of the human eye. The position of our bodies while observing or our perception of a certain number of features of a visual phenomenon in a given instant are by no means obligatory limitations for the camera which, since it is perfected, perceives more and better.
We cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we can endlessly perfect the camera.”
After instructing his cameraman to overcrank his Debrie and shoot him as he jumped from a balcony, Vertov explains the outcome of this experience:
“From the point of view of the ordinary eye it goes like this: the man walked to the edge of the balcony, bowed, smiled, jumped, landed on his feet and that is all. What was it in slow motion? A man walks to the edge of the balcony, vacillating:
To jump or not to jump? Then it is as if his thoughts say that everything points to the need to jump. I am entirely uncomfortable. Everyone is looking at me. Again, doubt. Will I break a leg? I will. No, I won’t. I must jump I cannot just stand here. An indecisive countenance is replaced by a look of firm decision. The man slowly goes off the balcony. He is already situated in mid air. Again, fear in his face. On the man’s face are clearly seen his thoughts.”
As a result, he concludes that from the point of view of the ordinary eye we see only untruth. The swift flicker of his camera, on the other hand, is capable of deciphering “life as it is”, even of reading and documenting its subject’s mind.
Moreover, Vertov’s “kino-eye” is also able to select by directing the attention of the viewer and thru editing; it is capable of condensing time and space by cutting and by fast motion; is able to merge diverse elements into a single visual experience via superimposition and montage if needed. However, Vertov fails to acknowledge an essential point: both the camera and the editing table require a human operator. And this remains to be the case to this day, when digital, high definition video and editing software have become commonplace.
On that utopian note, Vertov’s illuminated rhetoric flows in his manifesto, where he provides us with an early outline of “The Man with the Movie Camera”:
“I am the kino-eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world only as I can see it.
Now and forever I free myself from human immobility. I am in constant motion.
I draw near, then away from objects. I crawl under. I crawl on top. I move apace with a galloping horse. I plunge full speed into the crowd (…) manoeuvring in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations.
Freed from the rule of sixteen to seventeen frames per second, free of the limits of time and space. I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I have recorded them.
My path leads to the creation of fresh perception of the world. I decipher in new ways a world unknown to you.”
Six years on, Vertov and Svilova would epically assemble the film from the countless “kino-eye” rushes captured during the “kino-pravda” years, a calculated juxtaposition of materials aiming to produce a more meaningful structural whole:
“In fact the film is only the sum of the facts recorded on film, or if you prefer, not merely the sum but the product, a ‘higher mathematics’ of facts. Each term or each factor is a separate little document. The documents have been joined with one another so that, on the one hand, the film would consist only of those linkages between signifying pieces that coincide with the visual linkages and so that, on the other hand, these linkages would not require inter-titles, the final sum of all these linkages represents an organic whole.”
This “higher mathematics” of facts was to take the shape of a kaleidoscopic day in the life of any given Soviet town (the editing allows a creative geography where Moscow and Odessa are just a splice apart), preceded by a declaration of principles and nearly 3 seconds of intentional blank screen building up tension and raising our expectations:
ATTENTION
VIEWERS:
THIS FILM
Represents in itself
AN EXPERIMENT
IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION
Of Visible events
WITHOUT THE AID OF INTERTITLES
(A Film Without Intertitles)
WITHOUT THE AID OF
A SCENARIO
(A Film Without a Script)
WITHOUT THE AID OF
THEATRE
(A Film Without Sets,
Actors, etc.)
THIS EXPERIMENTAL
WORK WAS MADE WITH THE INTENTION OF
CREATING A TRULY
INTERNATIONAL
ULTIMATE LANGUAGE OF
CINEMA ON THE BASIS OF ITS
TOTAL SEPARATION
FROM THE LANGUAGE OF THEATRE
AND LITERATURE
After being introduced to the main characters of the film (Mikhail Kaufman, the cameraman, with his camera; the film reel and its audience in the cinema) we follow Kaufman as he ventures into documenting the realities of his time from dusk until dawn. The camera depicts an early morning urban setting, a woman awakes, and so does the city. People marry and divorce; a funeral and a birth take place. The pace of the day speeds up and we are shown labour and machines in operation, a self conscious thematisation of urban landscapes, industry and technology; we see sport events, musical performances, workers engaging in leisure activities, all in the presence of Kaufman as “life caught unaware” unfolds for his Debrie. A giant camera, with a human eye superimposed on its lens, dominates the city. We see Svilova, the editor, cutting together this material and we are transported back to the cinema, where the audience watches the camera and the film take on a life of their own before the camera closes its eye.
The film complex structure and many levels of thematic meaning grows from a love of Modernism and Constructivism and is dominated by the formalist concept of “obnazhenie priema”, understood as an aim to bare the filmmaking devices and make the viewer conscious of the mechanisms at work within the film. Vertov exposes us to a constant deconstruction of moviemaking and dramatic forms where we see shots of the cameraman’s footage, shots of the cameraman in the process of obtaining that footage and the editor putting together these shots. Aesthetically, Vertov attempts anything and everything, delivering a catalogue of innovative techniques and every possible film strategy available (a catalogue that will later influence Alberto Cavalcanti’s work for Grierson’s GPO documentary group and many others, e.g. “Coalface”, 1935): diagonal and boldly direct compositions aiming to incite the spectator to action, superimposition, split screens, varied speed, telescopic and microscopic lens shots, animation, subliminal shots, deliberate breaking of geographical and temporal continuity, use of hand held cameras, cameras on planes, trains and motorbikes. Film historian Jay Leyda comments on:
“In ‘The Man with the Movie Camera’ all the stunts that can be performed by a cameraman armed with a Debrie or hand-camera (sic) and by a film-cutter armed with the boldness of Vertov and Svilova can be found in this full to bursting film.”
But “The Man with the Movie camera” is much more than a box of tricks, and the aesthetical approach is soon overlapped by its moral and political intents: the superimposed image of the cameraman emerges from a beer mug and, as if intoxicated by the alcohol, we see shellfish performing a dance (a visual joke achieved through stop frame animation); the classical façade of the Bolshoi Theatre is shown through a split screen, with the old building seemingly breaking apart and imploding, representing the kinoks’ break from bourgeois tradition.
Aiming to equate art to labour and draw parallels between the filmmakers and the proletariat (additionally highlighting the social differences between the activities of the bourgeoisie and those of the working class), we are exposed to shots of a manicure parlour followed by Svilova’s hands splicing film and by other cutaways of women at work; the shot of a smiling bourgeois woman applying make up is juxtaposed to a that of working woman’s face, blackened up by coal; two well-off ladies in a carriage, uncomfortable with the cameraman going about his business, respond to Kaufman’s presence by mimicking his cranking of the camera. This is followed by a shot of the ladies’ maid, a barefoot woman absorbed by her duty of carrying their luggage. Vector connects the discomfort of these ladies with the exploitation of their servant, aligning himself with the underclass.
None of these shots can be understood outside the politico-historical frame that defines them: Russia’s shift to stricter communist practices following Lenin’s death and Stalin’s abolition of the NEP.
Vertov elaborates:
“All these have their meaning – all are victories, great and small, in the struggle of the new and the old, the struggle of revolution and counter-revolution, the struggle of the cooperative against private capital, of the club against the public house, of athletics against debauchery, dispensary against disease. All this is a position won in the struggle for the Soviet land, the struggle against a lack of faith in socialist construction.”
Lamentably, though, this political swift would also bring the troubled period of forced collectivisation of Stalin’s first five-year plan that would destroy Russia’s agriculture, a period of shameless party purges, expansion of the gulag system (corrective labour camps), and penetration of the secret police into all areas of life. This would translate into an increasingly hostile intrusion of Stalin’s bureaucratic regime, where blatant political propaganda (Socialist Realism) would be promoted and detailed scripts would be required for thorough examination prior to any shooting.
Vertov will find himself in a paradoxical situation: endorsing socialist construction, but at the same time unwilling to sacrifice his artistic freedom to political dictates. Vertov’s artistic integrity will prevail, holding up to “film-truth” and defending uncompromisingly freedom of expression he will stray from the dutiful path, adding uncomfortable fragments of “life as it is” actuality to “The Man with The Movie Camera” clearly opposed to the party line: vagrants are depicted as the city awakes; the deprived underclass populates bars and beer halls; a homeless young woman sleeps in a park bench. A subtle, even shy gesture later redeemed by his filming of the great Ukraine famines in the 1930s, the final nail on his kinoki coffin.
Much at odds with Stalin’s agenda, the Soviet avant-garde would be eventually demised, with Vertov’s filming paradigm denounced as “ideologically unsuitable”. Vertov, refusing to compromise and falling under ideological suspicion, would be denied full participation in the artistic community, and finally, forgotten.
However, Vertov’s theories would inexorably survive him, influencing the entire spectrum of cinema and paving the way for contemporary filmmakers, directing their attention towards a more realistic treatment of film aesthetics. Understanding Film History as a continuous struggle between the establishment agenda and the initiatives of the anti-establishment, an alternation between illusion and truth, “The Man with The Movie Camera” would be eventually unburied from the film archives and recognised as a fundamental cornerstone in the history of cinema, the “kino-eye” revived with Vertov becoming “emblematic of changing tides in cinema history and practice” . Hints of his film dogma can be appreciated as early as the late 1940s, early 1950s as Neo-realism breaks through in Italy (e.g. Vittorio de Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves”, 1948), although it won’t be until the rise of the politically committed documentary movement in Europe in the 60s and the advent of Cinema Vérité , a direct translation of “Kino-Pravda”, that Vertov’s teachings will be fully vindicated. The precedent being set, and influenced by Vertov’s formalism, Jean-Luc Godard will later name his ‘counter cinema’ group after Vertov himself. Before long, Nouvelle Vague filmmakers will follow, and more recently the Dogma 95 movement, forever keen to take their handheld cameras into the streets in an attempt to explore and experiment with the medium, find their stories in the lives of ordinary people and, above all, portrait “life as it is”. As we continue to do today.
© Jose M Barea Velazquez, March 2007
Agitation and propaganda.
Lenin himself approached Griffith and asked him, unsuccessfully, to head the new state film industry after viewing a stray print of “Intolerance”, Griffith’s 1916 film illustrating the problem of people's intolerance against other people's views. It is worth noting that “Intolerance” was unexpectedly progressive, shot by Griffith in response to critics who protested against his previous film, “The Birth of a Nation” (USA, 1915), for its blatant racist content.
David Curtis,”Experimental Cinema, a fifty-year revolution”. Studio Vista, 1971. p. 31.
Annette Michelson (Editor), “Kino-eye. The Writings of Dziga Vertov”, University of California Press, 1984, p. 145 (Dziga Vertov, “In defence of Newsreel”, 1939)
Luda and Jean Schnitzer & Marcel Martin (Editors), “Cinema in Revolution”, Da Capo Press, 1973, p. 82 (Dziga Vertov, “Kino-eye discussion”, 1924)
Annette Michelson (Editor), “Kino-eye. The Writings of Dziga Vertov”, University of California Press, 1984, p. 41 (Dziga Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye”, 1924)
Bill Nichols, “Introduction to Documentary” (Indiana University Press, 2001. p. 116)
Luda and Jean Schnitzer & Marcel Martin (Editors), “Cinema in Revolution”, Da Capo Press, 1973, p. 79 (Dziga Vertov, “Kino-eye, the embattled documentarists: How did it begin”, 1944)
Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary”, Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998, p. 53 (Dziga Vertov, “The Council of Three”, 1923)
Debrie: popular hand cranked, compact film camera in the 20s.
Barry Keith and Jeannette Sloniowski, “Documenting the Documentary”, Wayne State University Press, 1998, p. 45 (Dziga Vertov, “Kino-eye”)
Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary”, Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998, p. 55 (Dziga Vertov, “The Council of Three”, 1923)
Annette Michelson (Editor), “Kino-eye. The Writings of Dziga Vertov”, University of California Press, 1984, p. 84 (Dziga Vertov, “On The Man with a Movie Camera”, 1928)
Graham Roberts, “The Man with The Movie Camera”, I.B.Tauris, 2000, p. 36.
• Graham Roberts, “The Man with The Movie Camera”, I.B.Tauris, 2000, p. 88.
Barry Keith and Jeannette Sloniowski, “Documenting the Documentary”, Wayne State University Press, 1998, p.53 (Seth Feldman, “Peace between Man and Machine”)
In “Chronicle of a Summer” (“Chronique d'un été”, France, 1961) anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin set up a kinopravda experiment to discuss whether or not it is possible to act sincerely in front of a camera, filming a cast of real life individuals and finally showing their subjects the compiled footage, discussing the level of reality that they thought the movie obtained.
Godard's "Breathless" (“A bout de Souffle”, France, 1960), will continue to shock contemporary audiences with its bold editing, use of jolting jump cuts and hand-held camera.
Jose Luis Marques’ “Fuckland” (Argentina, 2000) features seven professional actors improvising their scenes with local residents, unaware that they are taking part in the production of a feature film.
Bibliography
• Vlada Petric, “Constructivism in Film” (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
• Graham Roberts, “The Man with The Movie Camera” (I.B.Tauris, 2000)
• Annette Michelson (Editor), “Kino-eye. The Writings of Dziga Vertov” (University of California Press, 1984)
• Luda and Jean Schnitzer & Marcel Martin (Editors), “Cinema in Revolution”, Da Capo Press, 1973
• Vincent Pinel, “Le Montage: l’espace et le temps du film” (Cahiers du Cinema, 2001)
• Marcel Martin, “Le langage cinematographique” (Editions du CERF, 1955)
• Bill Nichols, “Introduction to Documentary” (Indiana University Press, 2001)
• Barry Keith and Jeannette Sloniowski, “Documenting the Documentary” (Wayne State University Press, 1998)
• Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary” (Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998)
Filmography
• D.W.Griffith, “Intolerance” (USA, 1916)
• Dziga Vertov, “The Man With The Movie Camera” (USSR, 1929)
• Jean Vigo, “À propos de Nice” (France, 1930)
• Alberto Cavalcanti, “Coalface” (Great Britain, 1935)
• Vittorio de Sica, “Ladri di biciclette” (Italy, 1948)
• Jean-Luc Goddard, “A bout de souffle” (France, 1960)
• Edgar Morin, Jean Rouch, “Chronique d'un été” (France, 1961)
• Jose Luis Marques, “Fuckland” (Argentina, 2000)
“Bringing out the dead” (working title) - Dramadoc Proposal
“Bringing out the dead” is a socio-political drama exploring the themes of war, peace, reconciliation and historical memory in contemporary Spain. The makers of the film aspire to raise political awareness and to help giving a voice to victims of terror forgotten for over seventy years. Although aiming to interest a wide, international audience, the film would distinctively target three overlapping generations of the Spanish public willing to examine the truth about their history:
17 to 34: Those hardly taught at school, in depth, what happened in Spain in 1936.
34 to 54: Witnesses of Spain’s transition to democracy, but victims of an actively encouraged historical amnesia at a political level.
54+: Direct witnesses of the war or the Franco regime for whom the subject remains taboo.
Overview: This is a story about Spain facing the forgotten legacy of the Civil War, as seen from the perspective of an outsider. The military uprising against the democratically elected government of Spain in 1936 lead to three years of war and four decades of fascist dictatorship under General Franco; From 1939 on, nationalist terror will kill thousands and send many more to labour camps - a silent history of shame that Spain is still trying to come to terms with 70 years on, when a “law of historical memory” has finally been submitted to the country’s Congress for ratification and many people feel its time to seriously debate this important part of their history.
Our story is set in the context of the passing of this law and follows MOIRA, a young forensic student from Scotland, as a reluctant volunteer working for an NGO trying to identify and excavate the thousands of mass graves dotted all over Spain. Lacking official support, at odds with a culture and a language she doesn’t understand and struggling with the overwhelming nature of her assignment, she is about to leave. However, following the emerging friendship with an elderly local, ANA (a silent witness to the execution of her father by fascist forces in 1937 and his burial in an unmarked grave) she will reconsider staying in Spain.
We will thus follow MOIRA’s struggle to unbury and make sense of the terrible events the site hides, with the heated political debate, reactionary politicians and time as antagonists, but with each layer digged up not only shedding light into what happened on that spot 70 years ago, (50 Republican sympathizers - Ana’s father one of them – who, persuaded to turn themselves in to General Franco’s nationalist forces, were executed by the fascists firing squad) but also bringing us a step nearer to closure, repairing the dignity and restituting the memory of the victims, and finally allowing us to lay the ghosts of the Civil War to rest.
Chronology
Spain, a brief chronology of key events[1]
18th July 1936: Military uprising against the democratically elected government of the Republic.
1936-39 - Spanish Civil War: 500,000 Spaniards killed in the conflict.
1939 - General Franco leads Nationalists to victory. General Franco's fascist dictatorship spans over nearly four decades defined by hunger, indiscriminate state violence and terror. Republicans are summarily executed, jailed or exiled.
1946-50 – Franco regime ostracised by United Nations after the fall of the Axis; many countries cut off diplomatic relations.
1953 – Spain-US treaty: in the midst of the Cold War, Spain provides military bases to the US in exchange of military, political and economic backing.
1955 - Spain admitted to UN.
November 1975 - Franco dies. Succeeded as head of state by King Juan Carlos I. With Juan Carlos on the throne, Spain makes transition from dictatorship to democracy.
June 1977 – “Ley de Amnistia”; First democratic elections in four decades.
February 1981 - Failed military coup.
1982 - Spain joins NATO.
1986 - Spain joins the EEC.
2000 – Spanish archaeologists, anthropologists and forensics scientists found the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica or ARMH in Spanish) The group tries to locate the mass graves and identify the remains of those missing from 1936 to the 1970s.
2001 - Parliament grants political recognition to Republican guerrillas - known as the maquis - who continued resisting the nationalist dictator, General Francisco Franco, after the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939.
November 2007 - Parliament passes a bill formally denouncing Franco's rule and ordering the removal of all Franco-era statues and symbols from streets and buildings; Backing of initiatives to uphold the memory of the victims of the Civil War, including the exhumation of mass graves, most thought to be Republican; Researchers for the mapping of mass graves programme in Andalucia estimate over 648 sites and 53,000 victims in that region alone.
[1]Sources: Hugh Thomas, “The Spanish Civil War”. London, Penguin, 2003 (reissue); Pierre Vilar, “Historia de España”. Barcelona, Critica, 1990 (reissue); BBC Website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/country_profiles/992004.stm ; El Pais: http://www.elpais.com/articulo/andalucia/mapa/fosas/contabiliza/53000/victim%20as/comunidad/elpepuespand/20071130elpand_9/Tes
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