From: Cassidy Dimon (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Jan 11 2009 - 12:59:13 PST
The power of film to tell the stories of peoples directly effected by events outside their control -
UNDER THE BOMBS (released by Film Movement, you can find it on DVD as a subscriber and maybe in small theatrical release - on DVD to all in May) is a recently released French/Lebanese co-production that was shot during a cease-fire in the Lebanon-Israel conflict in 2006. It's shot among the ruble of the Lebanon as we follow a woman in search of her son. It is shot with only two professional actors, the rest are real refugees, journalists and soldiers. It's not a political film at all. It is the Lebanese showing the emotional and physical toll of war. They don't attempt to claim that any side is better than the other or ever get political, it just shows the costs of war on innocent people.
It was shot with very little budget or time.
This is why cameras are important.
This is why film is important.
The director: "The film was my reaction to the war. Either I gave in to despair or I tried to channel my hatred and anger into something creative...At first I thought this was an opportunity to develop the 'docudrama genre.' But I soon realized that what we were making was a film about those who were dying and those whose lives were being changed by war...We began to realize that this film was no longer about war itself, but its impact of the lives of ordinary people...We were being witness to the war...It was not like making a film - it was about living the film."
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From: Peter Snowdon <email suppressed>
To: email suppressed
Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2009 12:13:04 PM
Subject: Re: Cameras for Gaza
While I agree with much of what Fred says here, I think that cinema is not quite as powerless as he hints. Powerless, in terms of being able to provide context and/or rational understanding to events of apparent extreme irrationality.
Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi's Route 181 is as substantial a contribution to understanding the current situation in Israel and Palestine as are the writings of, say, Amira Hass or Tanya Reinhart.
And Avi Mograbi's films, above all Avenge but One of My Two Eyes, ask questions as complex and as uncomfortable as those to be found in any other medium or art form.
Thinking in film isn't limited to montage or narration: it's also there in the hard work of giving a structure to the whole work which has the power to undo some of the simpler assumptions of representation, and turns us back to interrogate the resonances which these images, these events, these people set up within ourselves.
An art form which can produce Tarkovsky, Straub and Mekas doesn't need to apologise to Thomas Mann, or to Noam Chomsky.
Complexity is always there for the taking, or the making. It is up to us whether we want to accept its challenge, or not.
Peter
Fred Camper wrote:
> malgosia askanas wrote:
>
>
> > Frameworks may not be the right place to debate politics, but it
> > definitely is the right place to debate the meaning and political usage
> > of images. This thread started with someone asking for donations to
> > send cameras to Gaza. In these days of routinely staged and doctored
> > images, is a "documentary" image really worth a thousand words? What IS
> > a "documentary" image worth - without knowledge of the matter, without
> > understanding and thought (all of which require words) - other than as a
> > tool to stir up a knee-jerk reaction?
>
> I don't agree with most of what's been posted here about Israel's war on Hamas, but I do agree with this. Images of killed civilians are not enough, and in fact could convey false impressions. I don't agree with Israel's attack, nor do I endorse the Allied firebombing of Dresden or the US nuking of two Japanese cities. But the Enola Gay flyers may well have been right to protest a planned exhibit over a decade ago that focused only on the bombing. They wanted a larger context, beginning with Pearl Harbor. But someone else could also argue that Pearl Harbor must be understood in the larger context of the US and Japanese imperialism that led up to it. Dresden must of course be understood in the context of World War II, started by the Germans, or, arguably, by the Germans and the USSR together, and not the Allies. The question of whether the firebombings of German civilians were justified then goes to questions such as whether such attacks helped shorten
the war, saving other lives, or in fact did not help. Or, if you're a complete pacifist, then you have to argue that case. Or, if you're some kind of racist, and think German lives are less, or more, valuable than others, then you have to argue those positions. Is cinema even a good vehicle for asking such questions?
>
> Cinema has in general not done a good job of making intellectual arguments. One might ask of the current war in Gaza, for example, under what circumstances is a war that will cause many civilian deaths justified? I might argue that rocket attacks that have killed no Israelis in recent months or years is not enough to justify the current war, in which, by now, more than a dozen Israelis have been killed. But others, including Israelis, can disagree, and those rocket attacks were in no sense legal, and certainly terrorized the population that they were directed against, and it seems to me that they were as morally unjustifiable as earlier Palestinian suicide bombings directed against Israeli civilians. The point is, reasonable people can disagree about this war, but such disagreements are moral and ethical and legal ones, and in that context, it's not clear how valuable documentary images from Gaza, or Sderot, would be. A complex skein of historical
facts and arguments is needed to provide context. And even then, reasonable people can differ on how wide a net to cast and how far back to go in analyzing the situation. Who really broke the case fire? Was Israel's unilateral pullout from Gaza absent a peace treaty even a wise idea? Who is to blame for the absence of a peace treaty? Was Israel's earlier occupation of Gaza and the West Bank justified? Is its settlement policy justified? Are the decades of Arab terrorist attacks on Israel justified? Was founding the state if Israel a wise idea, and what about the 1948 Arab war to wipe the nascent state off the map? What role does knowledge of the Shoah (the "Holocaust") play? Or do we start our history with the modern European colonization of the Middle East, or with the Crusades, or with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D., or even earlier than that?
>
> In most cases, I have found political documentaries sadly lacking in comparison with even a mediocre newspaper or magazine article. Moving pictures not only don't add much to my understanding of the issues; they can often help obscure understanding.
>
> On the other hand, I'm not sure that banning reporting from Gaza is such a good idea either! Was the US military's ban on images of the coffins of and funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq a good idea?
>
> I don't know of a cinema that can sensibly debate, or even ask, these kinds of questions, so in that sense I agree with Malgosia's "require words" argument. Dziga Vertov made a tentative stab, though, at trying to edit images in a way that widens the context of what you see, as in, for example, his famous reverse montage starting with a dinner table back through the phases of meat production.
>
> Fred Camper
> Chicago
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.