Director Mohamed Subahi tells the story of ordinary people yearning for an ordinary life- the beautiful people of Sudan. Whether introducing his film or speaking with us directly, he emphasizes this simple truth. Through characters from different social backgrounds and neighborhoods, characters who represent many aspects of Sudan that are often overlooked or unknown, he invites us to witness a shared dream: the vision of a civil and collective future.

Among them are Esra, a young mural artist; Mumin, a laborer; and Django, a father who joins the protests for the future of his children, making a living as a driver.

Starting in the 2010s, we witnessed global movements seeking freedom, equality, dignity, and representation. Though some managed to topple oppressive regimes, they often encountered eerily similar challenges: state violence, military interventions, rollbacks of hard-won rights, and hopeful beginnings slipping into fragile and uncertain outcomes.

In Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali; in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak; and in Sudan, Omar al-Bashir whose 30-year dictatorship fell in December 2018, were each swept away by such waves. Though we focus here on African nations, the spirit of resistance also surfaced elsewhere: from Turkey’s Gezi Park protests (2013) to the U.S.-based Black Lives Matter movement, which began with the Trayvon Martin case and peaked after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. These movements cultivated new cultures of resistance, political consciousness, and civic participation.

With the help of social media which, for all its current controversies, offered more than just headlines and documentary films that archived collective memory, these stories transcended borders. They turned struggle into flesh, bone, and heart and spoke to the conscience of the world.

Sudan, under three decades of dictatorship, banned cinema and many forms of art. Yet, despite this, a legendary generation educated abroad kept Sudanese cinema known through short films, film clubs, underground screenings, and nostalgic returns to the past. Suhaib Gasmelbari’s Talking About Trees captured this very spirit.

The revolution we long hoped for became a reality in December 2018. Mohamed Subahi’s Madaniya takes us beyond that moment. His film explores the period of hope and promise: the sit-ins of April 2019 where people demanded civilian, not military, rule, and the aftermath of the brutal June 3rd crackdown that took the lives of hundreds.

Much has happened since 2019, but the Sudanese people have never abandoned their dreams of a civilian government. The tension between military and civilian powers eventually escalated into civil war in 2023, between the SAF (Sudanese Armed Forces) and RSF (Rapid Support Forces). This forced millions, including the director himself, to flee. Yet the dreams of the people portrayed in Madaniya persist. The film gives flesh and breath to those dreams, bringing Sudan and its people closer to us.

Madaniya, a powerful documentary by Mohamed Subahi, a filmmaker who not only witnessed Sudan’s 2019 revolution, but lived through its hopes and heartbreaks.

At a time when protests were silenced, internet shut down, and lives lost, Mohamed turned to his camera, not as a weapon, but as a witness. Through the voices of Esra, Mumin, and Django, Madaniya reveals the deeply human side of a movement: its art, its labor, its longing.

This is more than a film. It’s a testimony. It’s memory. And perhaps, most importantly, it’s a vision of what Sudan could still become – a country not ruled by generals, but guided by its people.

Muhamed Subahi’s Madaniya was first screened at Sheffield DocFest and will now continue its journey in Istanbul, Saturdox curated by Necati Sonmez.

Mohamed Subahi

How did you become involved in Sudan’s resistance movement, and how did you begin filming the documentary?

I grew up under Bashir’s regime, a harsh and repressive dictatorship that shaped every aspect of life. It’s all I’ve ever known. That’s true for my entire generation and so is the desire for change. 

When I saw people in the streets, risking everything for their rights, I felt compelled to grab my camera and document what was happening. That was how it began. I spent three months filming, and when the sit-ins started, I knew I had to be there. That’s where I met the characters who became part of Madaniya.

Though we meet three main characters in the film, we noticed a fourth character, a young woman named Buh whose song is featured in the trailer. Can you tell us more?

Yes, that’s right, Tasabeeh Byha is a young, revolutionary woman full of passion and vision. Her song during the sit-in was not just an ordinary song; it was a patriotic anthem that inspired and united the protesters around a common cause.

In fact, there were more than four people, I originally filmed with six individuals. But in the end, I had to narrow it down. Three characters are a manageable number for a feature-length documentary in terms of narrative focus.

This has clearly been a long journey — not only for Sudan politically but for you, personally, making this film. Would you say you’re not just a filmmaker but also part of the resistance?

Absolutely. I wasn’t just a filmmaker standing behind the camera, I was part of the daily pulse of that moment. I lived through the events in all their detail, and my personal experience intertwined with my generation’s longing for a dignified life and a homeland that deserves us, just as we deserve it. The camera wasn’t merely a tool for documentation, it became my only means of resistance, of endurance, of preserving memory. I was filming with my heart before my eyes. I felt it was my duty, as both a citizen and an artist, to transform that violent moment into something alive, a testimony to what we dreamed of, and to what we lost.

Working on Madaniya wasn’t a creative decision as much as it was an existential necessity. I was there, among the people, sleeping and waking with them at the sit-in. I lived with them through moments of joy, hope, fear, and heartbreak. This film came from the flesh and soul of that experience, not from the imagination of a distant director. So yes, I am part of this resistance, and I will remain so, even if the tools change.

Could you describe your experience filming during those turbulent days? What happened during the sit-in?

I began filming even before the sit-in took shape, moving between neighborhoods, capturing the fear, hope, and bravery in people’s eyes. When the crowds started gathering in front of the military headquarters on April 6, 2019, I knew this was a historic moment that needed to be documented, not from a distance, but from within.

I decided to be there not just as a filmmaker, but as part of the dream. I stayed in the sit-in for 52 days. 

We slept on the ground, woke up to chants and songs, shared meals, painted murals, exchanged stories of a new Sudan. There was an extraordinary energy — a mix of creativity, awareness, and collective spirit.

But over time, the tension grew. Then came June 3rd the day of the massacre. That morning, we woke up to a total internet blackout. No calls, no messages, no updates. We were cut off from the world, as if they wanted to erase us from the map.

Then the violence began. We heard about people being targeted, bodies thrown into the Nile, gunshots in the night. I felt that my life and the lives of those around me was in real danger. As much as I wanted to stay, I was forced to leave, to protect myself and to preserve the footage I had because losing it would have meant losing a rare testimony of a moment that may never come again.

Your film doesn’t follow a strict chronological timeline. Events move back and forth — both in time and in the characters’ lives. 

The cinematography of Madaniya feels intimate yet politically charged. How did you approach visual storytelling in a time of chaos and danger?

That’s true. Life in Sudan isn’t linear. It’s messy. It moves forward and backward at the same time just like our political history. Sudan has always been caught in a cycle: a popular revolution, a short-lived civilian government, then a military takeover. This vicious circle keeps repeating. That’s why I didn’t want the film to follow a straight timeline, I wanted it to reflect this chaotic rhythm, the emotional back-and-forth, and the unresolved nature of our story. “Madaniya” is my way of breaking that circle, or at least exposing it for what it is.

Women played a visible and powerful role in Sudan’s revolution. How did you reflect this in your film, and what does it mean to you personally?

Women are the beating heart of Sudan’s glorious revolution, and they played a significant and visible role throughout the movement. My film focuses heavily on women and their impactful roles not just through one character like Esra, but through a broader narrative that reflects the strength and presence of Sudanese women in this uprising. Women were not just protesters; they were forces of change, sources of inspiration and resilience in the toughest moments. This film is a tribute to every Sudanese woman who participated and made a difference in the revolution. Personally, I feel a deep pride telling their stories, as they embody the spirit and hope of Sudan’s future.

In your poster, we see an army boot — a symbol that strongly resonates with the themes behind the title Madaniya. What does it represent for you, and how did you decide on this image?

The army boot in the “Madaniya” poster symbolizes the oppression and authoritarianism that Sudan endured for decades under military rule. It reflects the deep contradiction between military rule and the civilian governance that the people strive for. This contradiction is at the heart of the film, which portrays the struggle between military repression and the people’s desire for freedom, justice, and dignified life under civilian rule. The boot reminds us of power and brutality, but it also stands for the hope of resistance and building a peaceful, civilian-led future for Sudan.

Even after the fall of al-Bashir, Sudan still faces violence and conflict. You’ve left the country — but do you still maintain ties with Sudan and the people in your film?
Yes, I still maintain strong contact with the people featured in the film. They are still in Sudan, and fortunately, they are doing well despite the ongoing challenges. They continue to serve the community in various ways even after the outbreak of the war in 2023; for example, Mumin works as a volunteer helping provide medical treatment to people in a hospital, and others continue their work actively in Sudan. Our connection remains strong, and I follow their stories and support them as much as I can from afar.

Did you ever connect with Sudanese filmmakers in exile or in Sudan? Do you have a creative or cinema network in Cairo? Is there any solidarity between African or Arab filmmakers? 

Yes, definitely. I maintain ongoing connections with many Sudanese filmmakers both inside Sudan and in exile. In Cairo, I’m part of a creative cinema network that supports Sudanese projects and provides a space for artistic exchange and collaboration. There is strong solidarity among filmmakers across Africa and the Arab world; we share experiences and support each other, especially given the challenges we all face in our different environments. This network strengthens opportunities for co-productions and amplifies the voice of independent cinema telling our stories.

Were you able to screen your film in Sudan? If so, how was it received?

Yes, despite the difficult circumstances Sudan is going through, I was able to screen the film inside the country. We held small and discreet screenings in cities that were relatively safe. Even in the midst of war, there are still people who are hungry for stories that reflect their struggle and dreams. However, it’s not without risk today, simply speaking about a civilian state can get you labeled a traitor. That’s the reality we live in. But these screenings, though limited, felt deeply important. 

They were acts of resistance, of keeping the conversation alive.

What’s the current state of cinema in Sudan? Could you tell us more about the Sudanese Film Factory, which you’re part of? We’re also curious about the older generation of Sudanese filmmakers — Ibrahim Shaddad, Manar Al-Hilo, Suleiman Mohamed Ibrahim, Altayeb Mahdi — many of whom were forced into exile or couldn’t make their films.

Cinema in Sudan is in a very fragile state, especially after the war that broke out in 2023. Many cinemas have shut down or been destroyed, and a large number of filmmakers have been displaced or forced into exile. Despite all of this, Sudanese cinema is still alive  kept going by people who believe in its power as a form of resistance and a way to preserve our collective memory.

I was part of the Sudan Film Factory, which played a crucial role in nurturing a new generation of filmmakers. It was there that we learned how to tell our stories honestly and courageously, often with very limited resources. That experience was transformative for me as a filmmaker.

As for the older generation filmmakers like Ibrahim Shaddad, Manar Al-Hilo, Suleiman Mohamed Ibrahim, and Altayeb Mahdi  they are true pioneers. Despite exile, censorship, and marginalization, they held onto their dreams. They weren’t always able to realize their full visions, but their legacy remains strong. We’re building on what they started. We’re continuing the story, expanding it, and resisting through it.

Documentaries often serve as witnesses to history, helping build consciousness. How do you view the role of documentaries in general?

I firmly believe that documentaries play a vital and significant role in shaping public awareness and deepening understanding of important issues. They are not just a medium to convey information, but a space for reflection, empathy, and resistance. In places like Sudan, where history is often rewritten or erased by those in power, documentaries serve as counter-narratives — preserving voices that might otherwise be silenced or excluded.

For me, making documentaries is not only about recording what happens, but about how we frame those events, how we remember them, understand them, and act upon them. A documentary can transform a political event into a human story — one that transcends borders and lives in collective memory. It is a way of saying: “This happened. This mattered. Do not forget.”

Do you have any future projects planned? Looking back, how has making Madaniya changed you personally — as a filmmaker, as a Sudanese, as someone who had to leave their country?

Yes, I have several projects in mind that I hope to develop soon, focusing on stories that continue to explore Sudanese identity, resilience, and hope.

Making Madaniya changed me deeply — as a filmmaker, it strengthened my commitment to telling honest and urgent stories. As a Sudanese, it connected me even more to my people’s struggles and dreams, despite the distance. And as someone forced to leave my country, it made me realize the importance of memory and testimony, carrying the voices of those still living the reality I captured.

This film is not just my story, but a collective one — and it motivates me to keep creating, resisting, and believing in a better future for Sudan.

Director Guan Hu’s Cannes-winning film Black Dog is set in a desert city in North West China. A man returns home after years in prison for being responsible for someone’s death. He is well known in his hometown. Before prison, he was a motorcycle acrobat who worked in the circus and his act was very popular at the time. Although those who knew him treat him with respect, returning home is not easy… The house is not the same as he left it, and the relatives of the deceased are not at ease. 

Guan Hu is a sixth generation Chinese director. The 6th Generation, as it is known, made films in the 2000s. Unlike the 5th Generation, it tells the story of today’s China instead of the glorious China. We see the effects of the economic transformation in China in the background, even if we don’t always see it as the main story. It can be said that this generation made an urban cinema and focused on the common man.

Black Dog opens with a scene of a bus driving through the desert. There are only stray dogs in the Gobi desert, and a nylon bag flapping in the wind…The date is early summer 2008. China, which has made an economic leap in the 2000s, is excited about the Olympics, and the Summer Olympics are less than two months away. The choice of the movie is to tell the story of those who remain in the shadow of this light. The director says he chose 2008 for a special reason:

“That was a period when China’s economy was developing rapidly, and the whole country was both joyous and sorrowful. The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake also happened then. It was a significant year. I felt that placing the character’s fate against such a backdrop of upheaval would amplify the power of their story. Instead of focusing on the bars and young people of Beijing or Shanghai in 2008, I chose to focus on someone more distant, someone left behind by the times, someone forgotten. These are the people who, when placed in such a tumultuous era, reveal even greater strength in their stories.”(1)

Since the coal mines were abolished, the city has experienced a high level of migration. Empty workers’ apartments are being demolished to make way for new ones. In order to attract capital to the new factories to be opened, it is necessary to get rid of stray dogs. Lang, the protogonist, who joins this extermination team to earn money, meets a black dog while sabotaging the extermination out of pity for the dogs. The friendship he establishes with this dog will cause him to reconnect to life and get up from where he fell.

Imagine such a main character that throughout the movie he says nothing but “ya”, which means yes. Director Hu doubles his success in working with animals by narrating the main character without dialog. 

The 2008 earthquake makes the chaotic city even more chaotic, but this chaos is actually a resistance against the shaping of the city by capital as it wishes. The peacocks entering the houses, the tiger coming out of its cage, the dogs regaining their freedom, the snakes roaming around… are metaphors for this resistance.

Black Dog is related to a Turkish movie: Körfez (Emre Yeksan, 2017) in that it opens from dystopia to utopia as much as its main character who speaks little and returns to his homeland. It should not be surprising that the stories of the resistance of cities forced by capitalism to become the same are similar. 

1. https://thepeoplesmovies.com/interview-guan-hu-discuss-black-dog,  Robert Ewing ,  27 August 2024

The movie “Awara” directed by the Indian director Raj Kapoor has been repeatedly adapted in Turkey. Furthermore, if you happen to encounter its original in Indian, perhaps you will not be able to easily recognize that it is a dubbed version, because the voices of the same men and women in the early years of Turkish cinema makes the movie so natural for us, who are very familiar with the movies of Yesilcam (The Turkish Holy wood), that if it weren’t for the Indian music in the movie, you would think it to be a typical Yesilcam movie or vice versa.

Of course, the reasons for this fact can be attributable to Turkish film industry sector’s borrowing its melodrama tradition roots from its Indian counterpart. Following the Lumieres’ first public exhibition of the moving pictures in India in 1896, the first Indian film which was shot three years later and India has become the leading movie producer in the world as time went by. Some 800 pictures are shot a year and the cinema has practically become the sole entertainment source for the poor people of India, the population of which is almost 1 billion. The cinema is so crucial for the Indians that, “An Indian would die, if he/she did not go to the movies”, we could easily say. For them, the cinema where they sleep and have rest can also be called a shelter that they take refuge against both the hot and the cold.

In post-World War Two, the Indian cinema has considerably affected not only Turkish cinema but also that of many other countries in the world through its original films and adaptations. These adaptations have made their public appearance in two ways, that is, either by the screenplays or the songs and the lyrics dubbed in Turkish. This was the case for most of the countries, which did not have the strength for shooting any film in post-World War Two. Cinema is the most popular form of entertainment among those imported following the India’s declaration of independence against the English. Besides, new films being attractive to other countries in which the songs were being singed and the dances performed started to be shot as soon as the sound had been added. So, the cost has increased because of the introduction of the voice and the theatrical dialogs have started to sound. While the sound ensured the protection of regional productions, it strengthened the Indian cinema in the field of competition with the other countries’ film industries. In the aftermath of the world crisis, a formula of “a star, six songs, and three dances” was devised so as to revive the cinema. As it is the case today, the Indian cinema has significantly affected Russia, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and accordingly established its hegemony in most of the Asian countries. The cinema, which had been addressing mostly to the urban middle class during the period of dependence, won an enormous mass of new spectators of villagers who had left their regions and settled down in cities. The Indian cinema is the only one which produces Hollywood-like movies, but which the Hollywood films could not financially take under their dominance. Since the Indian cinema is a huge sector and frequently imitates Hollywood, it is also called Bollywood as film production companies have their place in Bombay. Protection of the national cinema in India is not attributable to a social progressiveness, but melodrama and dance passion of Indian people. Because, Bollywood is very successful in the field of shooting easily the local version of Hollywood films rather than expressing its own realities. India is the only country where Hollywood has no material dominance but only cultural as its Indian imitations are shot with the local cast. This is much more obvious within the framework of the new world order shaped by the recent changes.

Let us come to the new Indian cinema from Indian arabesques such as “Awara”. Social cinema examples had started to appear in India thanks to Satjayit Ray and subsequently dimension of poverty in India was thoroughly displayed. Ray shot his first film Pather Pançali in 1955 as the first of the Apu triology and addressed the real India. Thus, the first qualified Indian movie excluding any songs or dances has been shot. The new Indian film industry pursued the tradition of Ray and continued to make productions in addition to the commercial Indian movies thanks to its famous film producers such as Mrinal Sen, Ketan Mehta, Grish Karnard, and Shaii Karun. The films of “new movie makers” are both a view on the poor India and a means aimed at eliminating the traditional values and the superstitions. In view of the fact that the social life in India is structured by the system of caste and that the religious beliefs are deeply rooted, one can easily realize that what they try to do is a difficult one to accomplish.

The changes in all fields in India take place more slowly than those in Turkey. Thus, production period of the commercial pictures in India resembles ours, which were once shot by the cooperation of producer and manager. As mentioned by Shaji Karun, first an agreement is concluded with the actor/actress and then the money is received in advance from the owner of the movie theaters. Thus, movie theater owners have the release rights of the movies in the beginning. Today, the Indian producers who want to make films against the commercial cinema can stand only by means of festivals and national contests. However, their films barely have the chance of release. Seeing that India is an enormous country and that there are virtually 200 different spoken languages, it is almost impossible to address the whole country. Therefore, film productions take place regionally. These films are even more effective where the communists rule.

Besides, the common problem of the third world countries is that the films and their producers& directors whom we know well and who win awards in the festivals abroad are not well known at homeland. This is the case for not only Monsoon Wedding which was bestowed Venice golden lion award, but also Turkish and Iranian cinema that have enjoyed great successes in recent festivals. So, an inevitable question comes to the mind; “Is the festival cinema the concern of the west towards the east, or is it the one which emerges by the presence of this concern?”. The reviews of Mira Nair regarding her own country from a western point of view are much criticized at homeland. Mira Nair who still lives in New York is a director who pursued her education in the United States. Her latest film Monsoon Wedding got the biggest award in Venice Film Festival. She is one of the most renowned Indian directors abroad who successfully treats the cultural values of India by a contemporary interpretation and attracts the attention of the West through the rhythm in her films. Nair has entered the film industry by the documentaries. Following her first long film “Salam Bombay”, she shot “Kama Sutra” and “Mississippi Masala”.

Mira’s latest film “Monsoon Wedding” tells the story of the wedding preparations of an upper-class family living in New Delhi, the problems among its members and the wedding itself with a happy end. The parents get off their daughter Aditi with a computer engineer working in the United States whom they have never seen. The extended Verma family reunites from around the globe for a last-minute arranged marriage, which coincides with the monsoon rains. The film also includes the additional events such as the revealing of the love between the maid and Dubey, who arranges the marriage, and the harassments of the uncle from the United States. And the other India…..Nair turns her camera to the daily life during the flurry of the wedding preparations. Beside the enormous expenses for the wedding, she displays the other face of the city in poverty. And it is what the “original” is for the film. On the other hand, upper-class Indians live in prosperity behind the high walls of their big houses with and immense garden after the colonial rule of the British. Although organized in accordance with the traditions of one of the poorest countries in the world, the marriage ceremony is ostentatious for such a culture whose members wobble between leading a British or Indian lifestyle and in which the cliff between the Indian social classes has widened since the independence was declared against the British colonial rule. Even if cellular phones, American magazines as well as the latest-design cars in the film show what kind of changes India undergoes, the dominant part of the traditions also appear, i.e. spouses taking part in traditional arranged marriage and the narratives regarding the love between two teenagers (Dubey and Alice). Apart from the streets and the avenues in which the poverty is displayed, the cameras stroll through them for two purposes; the former is for shooting an ordinary television show and the latter for showing the pretended relationship of the upper-class Indians who came together during the golf. Nair shows for what cause India has changed by the banality of the show and the requested loan on the golf pitch. On the other hand, she contradicts herself to the extent that she would justify the critiques as the traditional arranged marriage in India, where much pressure exists on women, seems to be very easy and free of problems in her film.

“I did not watch Salaam Bombay, however Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra was just like an exotic Indian goods ” said Fatih Ozguven from Radikal (a Turkish daily) in his article on Monsoon Wedding. It is the case for Monsoon Wedding, as well. “You could easily get something like Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding if you combine the Turkish serial Kaynanalar (Mothers-in-law) with the uproar of Robert Altman together with the objectionable themes of The Festival ”, he adds. I am not prejudiced against Mira Nair, because Kama Sutra is the latest film of the director that I watched. Besides, “Salaam Bombay” is the continuation of Ray films. Kuma Sutra appears to be an Indian fairy tale which does not tell anything about the life of the Indians. However, Mira Nair proved to be more careful in Monsoon Wedding than Kama Sutra. To see the difference between the people having a Mercedes and those sleeping beside the Ganj makes a good example to show what happened to India in the near past. Because, this country possesses many engineers who are exploited on a low-based salary by the international market and the golf pitches in each city at the same time. Moreover, Dubey, who organizes the wedding preparations and is a member of the Indian middle class that is steadily developing, is the concrete example the changes experienced. At first sight, he is not attractive because of his cellular phone and diligence. We start to feel sympathy towards him with the love between Alice and him. After Alice asks “Is it tap water” (because lower classes neglect cleaning with water in India), he notices her and then he is much affected as she knows about e-mail and such things. Only the loves in this film may be coverted into a soup opera. And what is more is that the director continues matchmaking until the end. Many songs are signed and dances performed as it is the case in Indian melodramas. However, the songs signed in Indian melodramas are related with different times and places. They are outside of the life itself and theatrical. On the other hand, those in “Monsoon Wedding” are inside of the life because a wedding ceremony is narrated. Furthermore, festivals have always been very important for the Indian people despite all the troubles.

As far as I am concerned, whenever I think about India, the color orange comes to my mind. This feeling has strengthened with this film. Of course, the clothes produced there are original and the soil colors are dominant. So, the orange flowers which decorate the garden during the wedding ceremony strengthens this impression. The reason why I mentioned all these is that everything in the film belongs to the Indian culture, including the names Mira Nair used. It can be easily understood that Mira Nair will continue to transfer the Indian culture to the West with all its rhythm. Additionally, that the uncle from America was send back to his home and the people who had wobbled between Western and Oriental traditions chose their own cultures expresses much for the Indian cinema as regards the present traditions.

To the memory of Mehmet Emin Toprak

Turkish cinema, as in the whole Europe, encountered a very deep crisis at the beginning of 90s. While Hollywood films’ box offices were becoming more successful with the interest of the young generations which are grown up by neo liberal values in 80s and impact of the cultural imperialism, the audience of the local cinema was decreasing dramatically. The solution was very simple, to fight against Hollywood with its weapon which created a very clear distinction in Turkish cinema. At one side were the commercial films which became successful with the reproduction of the techniques and dramatic structure of the American cinema. These films are only for the local market.

On the other side a new generation of the filmmakers began to shoot their films with their own way of doing cinema which is more universal compared to the commercial films. Different from the earlier directors they were prolific and successful in telling their own stories. It is not easy to categorize these films – and I will not choose a simple solution like calling them “new Turkish cinema” – but some common characteristics may be drawn. First of all most of the new films are minimalist in the means of not only budget but also the staff of the film. Some of the directors like Nuri Bilge Ceylan act also in their own films. Second, in contrary to the growing tension in the society the stories of those films are told in a very humanistic way which is also true for the political films. I believe even the films with most brutal subjects stress on humanism metaphorically. Third, although Yilmaz Güney is still the main reference for the Turkish cinema, the references for the new filmmakers are mostly from abroad, directors like Ozu, Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Kiarostami or writers like Dostoyevsky, Chekhov. Finally, while the interest of the local audience for new Turkish films decreases because of the Hollywood domination in the market, the international popularity of the films is increasing gradually.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is the most well known and successful representative of this new generation. Before his cinema career Nuri Bilge Ceylan was a professional photographer. “Because I couldn’t find anything I wanted to do more. I studied electrical engineering, but after university I didn’t want to work as an engineer. I was a photographer too, but I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. So to decide – which is the most difficult thing in life – I started travelling. …I came across Polanski’s autobiography Roman. And it fired me up, this life that started out in the ghetto but changed a great deal, and I began to think: Maybe I could go into filmmaking. So I started reading books about the technical side of cinematography. And that’s how I decided to become a filmmaker. I came back to London, this time to study at film school. But it was very expensive, so I went back to Turkey and studied there for two years instead. But after that it took another ten years to get started – because starting out is the most difficult thing of all. Everything about it seems hard – human relationships, organisations…”(1)

He made his first film Cocoon in 1995 which was a short. After Cocoon he made four feature films. The Small Town (1995) was in the “Official Selection” section of the Berlinale. Clouds of May (1999) was chosen for the Berlinale competition. Distant (2002) and Climates (2006) were both at the Cannes Film Festival competition. Distant is the most powerful product of his cinema which was awarded with “grand prix” and best actor prizes in Cannes. The grand prix for Distant was a milestone for the international popularity and prestige of the Turkish cinema. Nuri Bilge Ceylan dedicated this award particularly to Yilmaz Güney who was able to take the same prize 20 years ago.

In fact this remembrance was nothing more but a kind of salutation of the preceding generations of Turkish filmmakers. Because Ceylan’s minimalist cinema is far from the great political films of Güney, which portrayed the distressing transformation of Turkish society in the 70s. Nevertheless he found a significant way to tell his own stories and the roots of his cinema leans elsewhere. “I am the sum of everything that has influenced me in my life; my observations, my own life, other films, everything. Tarkovsky is one of the filmmakers that have influenced me but even more than Tarkovsky I would cite Ozu; not only with his films but also with his decisions. As a filmmaker he became more and more sophisticated and in his final films he reduced things such as camera movements to the bare minimum. The subject matter also narrowed and this kind of attitude especially influenced me. Also, I think Ozu has a great amount of compassion for his characters and for people in general.”(2)

Ceylan does not like to work with a crowded crew and anxious to organise people on set which determined his style. He writes his own scripts, uses the camera himself, does the editing and even he played the main role in Climates. His films are made by a minimalist way. He does not like to make expensive attractions with the camera that helps to create a still atmosphere. Most of the actors, especially that play main roles, are amateurs. They are relatives, acquaintances or friends of the director.

The stories of Ceylan depict both the simple life of the countryman with his worries about the future and the life, and the loneliness and alienation of the middle class. Confrontation of those two main characters forms the tension. The middle class member either tries to exploit the country people (Clouds of May) or avoid them (Distant) if they are not useful for him.

Muzaffer Özdemir and Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Ceylan’s stories flow from the province through Istanbul. All four feature films are connected to each other only the focus changes. The Small Town portraits province of Turkey. The main character is young Saffet (Mehmet Emin Toprak) who tries to build himself a future but the opportunities in a small town are very limited. Although everyday routine is repeating itself continuously he likes to live in this town. He understood that he was somehow connected to that small place and the people of his town when he went to the military service. With his expectations, plans about the future, Saffet represents the progressive side of humanity while the members of his family are all done what they wanted to do in life and they have already started to live in the past. And of course the family is against the Saffet’s plans which identify a conflict between generations. Beside Saffet and elder representatives of the family the film discloses also the children of the family and the primary school of the town that are naïve, curious and at the exploring phase of the life.

In the Clouds of May a new character is included in the story, the director that lives in the big city and comes to make his film to the small town. Muzaffer (Muzaffer Özdemir) is very eager to shoot the film of his childhood and ignores everybody. He shoots his parents’ bedroom secretly, lies to Saffet who wants to leave the town for a better work in the big city and promises to help him in Istanbul. Saffet, as in The Small Town, works as an assistant to Muzaffer voluntarily and represents the countryman who wants more than the province offers to him but this time he is more direct and simple which indicates the difference between two films. The Small Town was the film about the childhood of Nuri Bilge Ceylan who certainly wanted to leave once upon a time like Saffet and because it is a film of the past it is composed of the mixture of the memories and the books –e.g. literature- Ceylan read. That’s why it is more literary. On the other hand Clouds of May is a film about present day dialogues are more direct and local. Saffet no more speaks like a character from Chekhov’s stories.

Muzaffer exploits everyone in the small town and forgets immediately his commitments after he finishes his film. Introduction of the Muzaffer as a middle class member from a big city connects the story to the third film, Distant in which we will know him better. What makes the distant so successful is beside the maturing cinematographic style of Ceylan the confrontation of two main characters in first two films the young man from the rural area and the middle class member of the metropolitan. This time their names are Yusuf and Mahmut respectively. In the search of better economic conditions and future Yusuf comes to Istanbul from the small town and as the many immigrants do in Turkey he stays with his relative Mahmut. Mahmut, who is a photographer and lost his desire against life facing a typical middle class situation, is very reluctant to staying with his visitor. The conflict is very clear: Saffet has desires, searches a job at a ship to go overseas, and follows a young girl in search of a relationship on the other hand Mahmut experience a kind of depression. He tries to avoid people to live in his nutshell without doing anything. Despite the endeavours of Yusuf, Mahmut refuses to build a relationship and Yusuf suddenly leaves the life of Mahmut as he came.

The Climates focuses on Muzaffer/Mahmut, the middle class character. This time he is called Isa who has problems with his girlfriend, Bahar and is living a middle age depression. In a summertime vacation we understand that their relationship come at point that they can’t bare to each other. They separate but the life does not offer much to Isa who goes through a pathetic relationship with an old friend and tries to turn back to Bahar. It is interesting to see Climates to witness the evolution of his cinematography and stories but I do not take Climates as powerful as the other films for two reasons. First when the other side eliminated from the story that is build on the loneliness and alienation of the middle class man lost its multi-tier, multi dimensional structure. Second this character has a lot of parts from the director’s life which probably keeps the director from putting a distance in-between. This kind of films, like the films of Antonioni or Buñuel, become interesting if the filmmaker stays away distant from the middle class where he can observe them clearly, and sarcastically and heavily criticise the little bourgeois conformism.

Ceylan likes to stroll around with his camera and follow his characters to unveil the relationship of the man and the nature. From his short to last film nature plays a crucial role for his cinematography. The viewer is invited to observe the nature by the camera and with the characters. Even in the first film Cocoon, trees, fields and river are shown. Especially the flow of the water is depicted in a very Tarkosvkian way. In the following films the director found his personal way of shooting the nature. The same elements appear again in The Small Town at the background of the story. While melancholy is the dominant feeling in the atmosphere of The Small Town and the short film, Clouds of May has the joy and the anxiety of the creativity at the same time. It is a film about making of The Small Town and in contrast to the first two films it was shot in colour and during the spring. Melancholy appears again in Distant while we walk through the streets of Istanbul covered with snow behind Yusuf, and share his worries about life and future. In the last movie, Climates, nature plays more important role at a visual level but does not directly affects the characters, instead it stays separated from the mood of the protagonists as we compare with the previous films. But as the name of the film indicates, Climates has images from different seasons of the year. Nuri Bilge Ceylan is not in the search of displaying the beauty of the nature or image on the contrary he tries to show inner dialectics (the endless cycles of the nature against the timeline of the shoots) and outer dialectics (the expectations, worries, feelings of the man against nature) by visual means.

One powerful aspect which contributes to the realism of the Ceylan’s cinema is his actors. He uses the advantage of the small crew to relax his actors as much as possible and make them to perform naturally. He started to use his family and acquaintances in his short film till the Climates. His father M. Emin Ceylan and mother Fatma Ceylan take parts in each film and show a very brilliant performance. In climates the very lively moment of the film was when the father appears with a woollen hat on his head. The young guy from the small town is played by Mehmet Emin Toprak who is a relative of director and was actually living in the Ceylan’s hometown in the first three features he developed his natural performance film by film. Unfortunately we lost him in a traffic accident which was like a tragic joke resembling his disappear at the end of Distant. As an amateur became one of the most important actors of modern Turkish cinema. The partner of Mehmet Emin Toprak in Clouds of May and Distant was Muzaffer Özdemir who played the mad person of the village in the Small Town is also not a professional actor. He is an architect and he made equally successful career with Toprak. That’s why they both took the best actor award in Cannes competition for their performance in Distant. Muzaffer Özdemir reflected both the malicious intention against the people of the town in Clouds of May and the cold, lonely and distant protagonist of the Distant, and he exposed very well the underestimating manner of the both characters against the others.

Ceylan became most important figure of the Turkish cinema both locally and internationally after Yilmaz Güney. With his evolving style of cinematography he invented a new kind of realism which is authentic and original but has references to the masters of the cinema also. His work give courage to the new coming directors indicating that cinema is not only money, with little you have the potential to do much. His focus smoothly moved from past to today, rural to urban life as the story of the Turkish people in last 50 years. Nuri Ceylan completed first period of his work and this new expansion to the urban life has its own stories that are waiting to be told.

Notes

(Published by Thessaloniki Film Festival / Balkan Survey in 2006)

1) Beyond the Clouds: An Interview with Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Geoff Andrew, Senses of Cinema (Australia), June 2004

2) A Quick Chat with Nuri Bilge Ceylan / Jason Wood, Kamera (UK), May 2004

In a snowy winter day, the children playing on the snow-white road, sliding, decide to play a game to the village’s loony when they see him coming. Without thinking that they are doing something bad, they just laugh at the guy when he slips and falls. First he laughs too with the kids. But the smile on his face soon fades in to another expression, becoming more and more apprehensive and pathetic. The multiple expressions of this face and the kids’ plays over the weak that they feel power over lead the film from the very first scene.

Muzaffer Özdemir, whom we meet, may be by coincidence (thanks to the improvising nature of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s filmmaking), at the first yet astonishing scene of The Small Town, becomes a reflection of Nuri Bilge Ceylan in his later films, Clouds of May and Distant after The Small Town. Till the director’s last film The Climates in which the director acts also. In Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films, faces, expressions on the faces and postures acquire a meaning within the wholeness of the film. Human faces and details from the faces, nature and details from the nature enlivens from photographs in his films. Considering Cocoon, The Small Town and Clouds of May, the main faces (characters) in all films are the director’s mother Fatma Ceylan, his father M. Emin Ceylan, Mehmet Emin Toprak and Muzaffer Özdemir. People from his family or his close friends form both the distinguishing side of Nuri Bilge Ceylan cinema and also the realistic nature of his filmmaking. The things that bring about realism though are not only the documentary screening of the small town, the real people living in that town or even his own parents’ acting in the film, but the ad-libbing presentation of life itself, making the spectator feel that what they see is what they see, i.e. the reality. His parents who most of the time play their own lives, and can not reject to their son’s wishes or resist to his convincing techniques, find themselves acting in the film eventually become an important and hearth warming part of the Nuri Bilge Ceylan cinema starting with the Cocoon. We don’t know whether one of the Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s convincing techniques for his parents, like was the case in Clouds of May, is to complain that the well-known Uncle Pire from the neighboring village demanded money for acting. But we know in Clouds of May that the real reason is the director in the film (Muzaffer Özdemir) actually does not want Uncle Pire to act in his film. That’s why, he does not want to get in a long conversation with the old lonely Uncle Pire, who lost his wife and goes back to try to convince his own father to act in the film following an unavoidable test shooting with Uncle Pire.

The black and white, 18-minute short film, the Cocoon as its name implies is the first manifestation of the director’s lust for filmmaking. This film emerges from the inner conflicts of the director in his desire for making a film he likes, leaving his cocoon & concerns aside. On the other hand, we probably can not argue that limited socialization in his way of film making like shooting always from his cocoon is only for economic reasons. He was 36 when he started to shoot the Cocoon in his own village, where he grew up. It took about a year to complete the Cocoon. He used a second-hand 35 mm camera while shooting the Cocoon by himself and the team expanded to two people while shooting the Small Town and further four people at the time of Clouds of May. Nuri Bilge Ceylan makes the film of humanity via images from his childhood, feelings from past to present… In his small town trilogy starting from the Cocoon in which he practiced cinema with a much more photographic approach, he continues to tell the relationships between people in the rural areas, the human and nature connection via a method fed on his own experiences, memoirs and insights on humanity from childhood to the later stages of life.

In the Cocoon, a black and white movie which is not a silent one but does not have any lines either commanded by photographic techniques & aesthetics, Nuri Bilge Ceylan turns his parents, whom we become more acquainted with later on, into strong actors free from their identities. Seeing the film starting with old pictures, we understand that the days when the woman and man were together are far gone. The old man lives alone in a house in the countryside, as in a cocoon. The woman, whom he hasn’t seen for years, comes to this house with her luggage in her hands, leaving her house in the city. As the couple retry living together in the country house, a small kid hanging around with his sling and the nature accompany them. The breeze, whispering leaves, trees, the flowing stream, fields, cemeteries, bird, cat, turtle and the man as part of this nature. The woman will turn back to where she comes from. The nature and certainly the human faces showed with an impressive combination of sound and image; do also possess a meaning about time. It is difficult to avoid making connections; the mother and father who are tried to be convinced to act in Clouds of May watch the Cocoon, which cause them to “feel that time is passing and they are getting old”. We see the sights of the Cocoon again in the first black and white feature film the Small Town and the second colorized movie Clouds of May. The people who are actually living in the small town, the town itself and the life on the countryside do actually appear in all three films, and in many ways emerge from each other besides the apparent interconnection between them.

The Small Town originates from a childhood memory of the director, and the feeling that this memory resurrects. The security feeling of a child who falls asleep on the field as his family has a long conversation on the side of a fire till dawn. The Small Town which has no full script and was developed on an unfinished story of the elder sister Emine Ceylan, with quotations from Chekhov is a revival of the director’s memories on the elementary school, cemetery, and time idled on fields in his home-town. This revival or this “returning” to the town is a product of an educated, intellectual mind that left the town long time ago but yet also owns the sincerity of the town as it shows itself. He is both in and out of this world from which he actually comes from. His vision is both close to the film itself and within and also stands outside with a distance. He is in this world because he was one of the people sitting at the side of the fire on fields, attended the same elementary school and also crossed by the same cemetery as he walked to the field. But he can also look at it from a distance both as a person living in a city now and also as a director affected by Chekhov’s stories and the heritage of the cinema masters like Ozu, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Bergman and Kiarostami. In Clouds of May, acting together with his parents in his home-town, the director can look at his own relationship with the town people from outside but at a closer distance. His experiences in the Small Town make him understand the situation better, and his vision matures over.

Small Town – Mehmet Emin Toprak

In the Small Town, we see strolling dogs and unemployed young people on the empty streets at the early hours of a winter day, and the town livens up when the kids get on their way to school. In the first part we see the atmosphere in a classroom and Asiye’s embarrassment as she does not notice the bad smell of her lunch. Small kids reading out “the rules of social life” and “family” from their books, kids and the teacher gazing outside through the window, child coming from far through the snowy fields, warming up from the stove’s heat in the classroom, feather flying in the air all together convey the atmosphere to us. In the second part, Asiye and his younger brother start their journey to home out side the town through the fields. It is a journey which tells how children relate to nature, explore and learn. Childhood and quilt are the main common themes shown in the Cocoon, the Small Town and Clouds of May. This theme first appearing in the Cocoon also reemerges and evolves in the Small Town, and is settled in Clouds of May. The third part is the reunion time as children arrive from school for all the family members, and for different generations, as they gather around fire, eat corn and chat till dawn. Although coming after one another, different seasons are seen in different times of the day in the film symbolizing the stillness of time or self repeating nature of flowing time in the countryside. The conflicting characters of the small town come together in this part of the film. The grandfather, a symbol of fight and faith returns to his home from war exile. The father who is capable of solving problems with his technical aptitude and is knowledgeable about history returns home from the U.S.A. after taking his graduate degree. The young Saffet, who has often felt the boredom of rural life deeply, even leaning towards “nihilism”, and recognized how strongly he is actually attached to the small town that he wants to leave when going for the military service, comes back to home after the completing his service since he doesn’t have another alternative.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan cinema evolving from improvisation to fiction, having situations turning into stories, carrying the general human states and boredom to more subjective scenes do follow a simple main theme which remerges from the previous film and always involves the naïve side of the story. These films which keep the life itself above the cinema and bring them together are the shots of a director who looks to his origins, filming the nature, his father and his mother with great respect. The director devoted the Small Town to his parents and Clouds of May to Chekhov who he describes as a person who deeply feels the tragic elements of life and easily explains the ones which are found the most inexpressible. As Chekhov says, “everything has to be simple, totally simple…” like in the Small Town…

(Published by Thessaloniki Film Festival / Balkan Survey in 2006)

Yasujiro Ozu is the one of the most widely known Japanese film directors and yet the essential elements in his films create maybe the most local style in the eastern cinema. This is the key to the fundamental tension present in Ozu’s complete corpus: He tells his unimposing stories on middle class Japanese characters with a technique adapted from the traditional Japanese culture: Zen, tea-ceremony, kabuki are most important influences construing the elements of his film language. However, through the most Japanese elements, Ozu’s films are stories about the universal human condition and maybe they even transcend it. My aim in this assignment is to take a closer look to the narrative and structure of an “Ozuan” cinema through his most well known movie “Tokyo Story”. This inquiry shall bring us first of all to answer the question “what is it that makes the movie so touching and remarkable for the non-Japanese, in particular western viewer despite its non-dramatic narrative and sharply eastern style?”

The process that the western spectator is going through when faced with Ozu’s taciturn character is what Paul Schrader calls “extracting the universal from the particular”. According to Schrader, Ozu’s films are made according to a “transcendental” style which exceeds the experience, transcending the immanent by definition. For Schrader it is the art form most near to the religion, based on a necessary structured, ritual-like constituted out of repetitions and harmony to express “the Transcendent in the human mirror”. What he sees as the conditions for the transcendental style in Ozu, I mark it as the source of the seemingly contradiction in Ozu’s cinema in general and Tokyo Story in Particular: creating a distance to the peculiarity of the characters and the undermining of the insistence on the reality of the representations with a cinema of mise-en-scène (with limited field of vision and a certain amount of primitiveness) arise from the adaptation of the Japanese understanding of art and therefore they are supposed to be the foreign elements to a the western eye. But these are the very elements that support a general inquiry of the universal human soul as such.

Tokyo story flows from the same source with most of Ozu’s movies. It is based on the story of a Japanese family of après-guerre generation in the rapid process of modernization. The process is painful since it must deal with the difficulty of cultural change but beyond that it is the modernization of a generation that has experienced the painful, destructive face of the world war two. Modernization in the sense of an adaptation to the western civilization is challenged by the ugly side of the west, the creator of the atomic bomb. The main tension is between the individualist west and the traditional Japanese family. The western materialism is for Ozu always a threat to the Japanese family grounded on the tacit communication of the members.

The movie runs in a simple narrative with a moderate climate and no surprises ever. This is mocked by Bordwell as:

It is as if stylistic organization becomes prominent only if the themes are so banal as to leave criticism little to interpret. (p.282)

An elderly couple visits their grown-up children in Tokyo. Too busy to entertain them, the children pack them off to a noisy resort of spa. Returning to Tokyo, the old woman visits the widow of another son, who treats her better, while the old man gets drunk with some old companions. They seem to realize they are a burden, and simply try to smooth things over as best they can. By now the children have, albeit guiltily, given up on them; even when their mother is taken ill and dies, they rush back to Tokyo after attending the funeral. A simple proverb expresses their failure: “Be kind to your parents while they are alive. Filial piety cannot reach beyond the grave.” The last sequence is of the old man alone in his seaside home, followed by an outside shot of the rooftops of the town and a boat passing by on the water. Life goes on.

What creates the movie is beyond the plot: the combination of the stylistic features peculiar to Ozu with the touching details spread to the whole story. The first apparent characteristic of the film is its taciturn development. The destroyed ties between the parents and the children do not cause this silence, since the traditional Japanese family is itself foreign to verbal communication. So the non-verbal development of the narrative is the first sign of the dominance of traditional culture over Ozu’s style. This has the result that the not self-expressive characters become anonymous as “any family”, as the example of the universal family.

The second point is Ozu’s usual technical choice: the camera is located as an invisible Japanese guest sitting on the traditional tatami, three feet above the ground. But as pointed out in Bordwell’s article, Ozu maintains this choice even for outdoor shootings. So the camera cannot be truly identified with this invisible witness. This serves for a limited field of vision in total accordance with the two dimensional painting tradition of the east. In the entire movie there is one single, imperceptible movement of the camera: no pan, no zoom, no dolly. Between the indoor settings with little exception the only place where the narrative develops, there is a pause with an outdoor shooting of a landscape or an irrelevant work of architecture. For the use of this trademark of Ozu, I agree with Schrader’s view: they serve as mu – the concept of negation and void in the painting and gardening. Traditionally this void is not to underline the motive (action in this case) but the action underlies the mu. This is the transcendence in Ozu’s films: his aim is to deliver the spectator to the spiritual silence he can arrive at only by transcending the little human actions. And in order to draw attention to the non-communicable essence of life, Ozu chooses minor events in the plot. There is no drama, but bitterness and this bitterness is created by irony: as in the example of the mother staying overnight in the house of her widowed daughter-in-law, saying: “What a treat to sleep in my dead son’s bed.” Irony is the key to the transcendence.

The minority of events support the main link that connects Tokyo Story to the culture of Zen. In tokyo syory, every action takes place very slowly creating absolute no sense of a development in the spectator; it is only simple steps of the daily life following each other. Ozu even diminishes the dramatic effect of happenings like death shifting the climax of the movie to a very uneventful point in the story: The widowed daughter-law bursts into tears because of an ethical conflict in her heart, which the viewer is not much informed from except the point that she is disappointed from the common despair, absurdity and cruelness of life. Zen as a religious-philosophical activity is based on these unimportant commonplace activities. Like Schrader point out, it makes no distinction between the fine and manual arts, in fact Ozu is usually seen (and wanted himself to be seen) as a craftsman rather than artist. Every shot he uses in the movie seems to be a variant of another or even a repetition some shot from a previous movie, however for Ozu this is the source of authenticity. His style as a director seems to be only as a means for Zen to be at work and the humble style of the movie no matter how exactly defined and worked on draws no attention to any specialized human presence: not to the peculiar characters and not to Ozu himself, but only to the people of the universe.

Schrader uses the dichotomy between “primitive” and “classical” as the keyword towards an interpretation of his art; the basic dichotomy manifests itself in sub-dichotomies: irrationalism vs. rationalism, repetition vs. variation, sacred vs. profane, two-dimensional vs. three-dimensional, tradition vs. experiment and anonymity vs. individualization. This primitiveness doesn’t refer to an ancient phenomenon, although it has roots in the far history of humanity this is not an attitude left behind but on the contrary, it is a key to understand the situation of the man in the devastating nineteenth century. What Ozu is trying to establish in the hard-flowing time of Tokyo’s everyday life is the human transcendence resisting the affects of temporality. We can read this in the eyes of the old couple: filled with wisdom, irony, melancholy, tranquility and disappointment but hope and acceptance at the same time.

The rejection of the temporality can be detected from the fact that there is no past and no history efficient in the narrative. Everything happens and passes simply by; if it would be a play of Shakespeare we would have to face at least the ghost of the son who died in the war. But we don’t. Instead there is the general bitterness caused by the war. Again this is probably related to the transcendental elements based on the Zen culture, and again this is what makes the story for the spectator any story as such.

Tokyo Story is an example perfectly characterizing Ozu’s world, but there is more. It also characterizes our world and the international reputation of the film is more than normal, as expected as any climax in one of his plots.

References:

Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Wisconsin: Routledge. 1986.

Paul Schrader. Transcendental style in film : Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1972.

“A film cannot resolve the social and political issues it raises. Instead it records to what extent those questions remain unresolved, their difficulty, misunderstanding, conflict, lack of a solution and sometimes their impossibility.”

Alejandra Riera, Maquetas-sin-cualidad, 2004.

“The works I have been producing can be viewed in general as different attempts to deal creatively with cultural difference (the differences both between cultures and within a culture). They seek to enhance our understanding of the heterogeneous societies in which we live, while inviting the viewer to reflect on the conventional relation between supplier and consumer in media production and spectatorship.”

Trinh T. Minh-ha, Identity and Representation,1996.

The film and video programme Prologue. Towards experimental ethnographies which we present in this year’s Barcelona International Women’s Film Festival, has its origin in meditations on geopolitical aesthetics, gender and globalisation which different audio-visual narrators have been producing in localised social and cultural contexts since the Eighties. Following on from the line of argument established in last year’s programme, this year the cycle continues its interest in recent documentary accounts that continue to look at the politicisation of gender narratives and the construction of subjectivities. Filmmakers Berke Bas, Hito Steyerl, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Tracey Moffat, Sally Gutierrez, Caecilia Tripp and Lisl Ponger identify the new global conditions in which representations on class, race and gender are shown, through the creation of visual documents.

Prologue. Towards experimental ethnographies is part of a wider research project we are carrying out on the subject of documentary practices, from different locations and perspectives, with regard to a series of gender narratives that question the actual forms of representation and diffusion with which they work. Our interest lies in exploring and extending the idea of experimental ethnography proposed by Catherine Russell(1) based on the visual document. This narrative and research strategy extends through an itinerary of devices and activities that will take place over the coming months.

The programme of films in the festival is complemented, on the one hand, by a workshop run by the visual artist Sally Gutiérrez. Taking her own documentaries as a starting point, the filmmaker will focus the workshop on ways of inhabiting the urban environment, and on the various resistance strategies its inhabitants employ – particularly women – in between the gaps left by multiple global systems that are never completely controlled. On the other hand, and as its title indicates, this year the programme of films has been designed to act as a prologue to the exhibition Working Documents, which will take place at the La Virreina-Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona . It also establishes a direct link with the projection-debate coordinated by the artist Sandra Schäfer on the 13th June at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona on gender and representation policies in Afghan cinema.

The case study that gave rise to Working Documents as an itinerary of the visual document is found in the material filmed by Maya Deren between 1947 and 1954 on life and ritual in Tahiti, which led to part of the film “Divine Horsemen: the living gods of Haiti”. Deren starts to develop her theory of film in articles like “Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film” and “Cinema as an Art Form” (1946). In these, she emphasises the need to develop cinema as an art of context, endowing it with process, in contrast to the forms of spectacle and consumer culture, both elitist and popular, which are currently embodied by the Hollywood narrative, and which today are perpetuated in the focus of narrative as a process of narrative statement, conflict and resolution.

Maya Deren’s specific process-based ethnographic writing enables us to create a trans-historic link with a new type of documentary-making which emerges in the Eighties, and which brings with it the need to create visual documents that go beyond the different classical formats in which a narrative is transformed into a documentary. This urgent perspective of an immediate reality represents a paradigmatic change in ethnographic cinema, and imposes itself over the supposedly neutral notion of direct cinema and the direct account of an event, as shown in the “cinéma vérité” of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin in “Chronique d’un été” (1961). In contrast, the feminist ethnography we present here offers a perspective on the idea of “experimental ethnographies” in which antagonistic bio-political practices of the visual document would be located.

The deconstruction, image of appropriation, staging and post-production of the narrative are clear symptoms of the post-capital era in which the image-document becomes the reading of social contexts. The documentary methods and examples we are screening act as spaces for mediation between the setting prior to the document’s creation and its launch into circulation, questioning the social context in which the images are read and interpreted. As a result the focus of interest of these films moves from the representation of the documentary narrative to the question of how the narratives inscribe themselves in the social and physical context, and how in turn they place themselves at the service of the subjectivities they inhabit.

The first part of Prologue. Towards experimental ethnographies includes a pioneering work in terms of the thought of the Eighties, which explores the cartography mapped out by “women in the developing world”: the film Reassemblage by the filmmaker of Vietnamese origin Trin T. Minha-ha integrates the post-colonial vision from a position that is critical of the cultural subject. Thus the shooting of the documentary itself becomes a reflection on the traditional ethnographical discourse in terms of who speaks, who films and how the subject situated on the other side of the camera is represented. In the film from Turkey “In Transit” (2005) and the film from the Philippines “Nazareno Negro” (2007), Berke Bas and Sally Gutiérrez reflect, from different contemporary situations, on the documentary perspective established by Trin T. Minha-ha, which is defined by the “outside in – inside out” nature of her position, enabling us to cross and enter into dialogue with the environment and its witnesses by bringing together multiple locations that locate us before a reflexive visual ethnography.

The second part features a variety of narratives constructed between fiction and the visual document, which break the established order of the symbolic to question the issue of cultural translation and to demolish the hegemonic vision of the oral and written tradition. Thus we recover the idea that Hito Steyerl raised in her text The Politics of Truth – Documentarism in the Art Field (2) , which is that in its function of structuring and acting upon the social arena the documentary adopts bio-political functions. So action through symbolic products can essentially develop in the field of culture, and it is there that mechanisms of diffusion will have to be built which will enable a new form of seeing and contributing to the uncovering of deception by the media hegemony.

The selected narratives of gender establish an interplay of scenic representations which combine the strategy of the archive, the autobiographical narrative and the dissemination of images in the film “Lovely Andrea” by Hito Steyerl (2007). The symbolic translation of the cultural imagination in cinema, photography, dance, theatre, music and literature can clearly be seen critically in the film “Imago Mundi” by Lisl Ponger (2007). The resources of the theatrical set that the film-maker Tracey Moffat uses in Nice Coloured Girls (1987) deconstructs ethnographic films through the use of subtitles, and avoids the cliché of so-called realist reconstructions. This system of trans-cultural exchange is centred on the idea of the translation of local and global imaginations, as the film-palimpsest My Curaçao (2005) by Caecilia Tripp argues.

Seen overall, this selection of gender narratives represents the mediation, cultural agency and documentation of activist positions in the form of essays on the global representations that are today narrated to us.

(1)Russell, Catherine: Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1999.

(2) Steyerl, Hito: “The Politics of Truth –Documentarism in the Art Field”, in Vít Havránek, Sabine Schaschl-Cooper, Bettina Steinbrügge (eds.): The Need to Document . Zurich: IRP Ringier, 2005.

Yeni Film, No.16, Nov. 2008

TOTAL WORK (1)

The socio-political events of 1968 caused an impact in the West, thanks to the liberation movements, which brought with them an understanding of the particularity, the difference and the specificity of the social and intellectual aspects that have defined postmodern thought. These changes have been projected into the dynamics of post-industrial society through the consolidation of service industries, on the one hand, and the application and use of new communication technologies, on the other. Within the sphere of production, the Fordist model, traditionally linked to the factory structure, to the assembly line, and determined by fixed units of time, place and action, has been succeeded by what is known as “immaterial work”, which appears as the node in the recent production/consumption relation.

The post-Fordist production model implies, then, that the traditional division between productive and reproductive work, between exchange-value and use-value, has undergone a process of flexibilisation, causing most of the capacities, until recently considered as pertaining solely to our private apace ad our time, to now become directly productive factors.

This redefinition of the concept of work has been analysed from the perspectives of different critical theories, including feminism which has assimilated it into “female work”. Thus, the affective, relational, creative, cognitive and symbolic qualities, which had been characteristic of reproductive activities carried out above all by women, are now a vital part of the productive process and increasingly demanded of the workforce.

To these developments, which have taken place in the global economy in past decades, we must add the welfare crisis and the privatisation of public services, increased unemployment and the resulting migratory flow. All this has accelerated the process of precarisation among citizens, submitted to a working system characterised by flexible working hours, temporary contracts, extensive workdays, work at home, unpaid holidays, and so on. These working conditions have led to a modification and a reinforcement of already existing social and economic hierarchies that have particularly affected those groups which are least favoured, most notably women, one of the most hard hit collectives.

The exhibition proposal that we present under the title Total Work offers a reflection on the shift from material work to immaterial work (although both still coexist and need each other) within the context of economic globalisation. It focuses its analysis on two processes: the feminisation of the workforce, a historical phenomenon that has grown in recent decades in response to labour deregulation, and the feminisation of poverty, which appears to find its most visible face in what are known as “alternative global circuits”-often transnational territories – but also in the big cities as a consequence of new market conditions.

Furthermore, as a topic secondary to the central thrust of this project, we include a discussion that addresses the sphere of artistic production, the qualities of which have also been reappropiated and made profitable by the capitalist market.

Thus, as cultural producers devoted to the construction and criticism of representation, and no strangers to job precariousness, we consider it to be of vital importance to place ourselves within the production system, to know what our situation is as consumers and as generators of symbolic and economic gains. Out of this conviction, Total Work approaches precariousness as a territory for investigation and as a way of life. Not as victimisation, exclusion or isolation, but rather as a place of political action and collective structuralisation.

We therefore propose a parallel reading of certain feminist discourses and strategies of representation so as to develop a politisation of our practice through symbolic production. This will help us to reveal other forms of visibility and resistance to what has been termed “female social precariousness”.

The proposals by Maria Ruido and Ursula Biemann from different perspectives (local and transnational) and approximations, and beyond mere documentation of a given reality, enter the labour world to produce, through word and image, a counter-geography of precariousness based on histories and subjective experiences.

Hence Biemann sets out a mapping of the sex trade in the information era, which incorporates gender, ethnicity and class variables, to explore, through different female voices, the routes these women follow towards transnational spaces, their conditions of life and work. Maria Ruido examines the conditions of immaterial work and the experience of precariousness in our lives, by reviewing, on the one hand, the antagonistic strategies of image production, and on the other, certain modes and spaces for self-management of groups of women striving for a transformation of labour conditions, inasmuch as they constitute venues for new forms of collective sociality and production.

Total Work has opted to exhibit a breakdown of the oeuvre of each artist which materialises through a dual process of induction and deduction. While Biemann follows a reorganisation process based on the deconstruction of her own filmed material in order to create a proposal that she has termed “World Sex Work Archive” –in other words a file assembled from interviews with different women, female sex workers and activists (partially show in Total Work)-, Maria Ruido combines different media (texts, films, slides and interviews) accumulated in the months leading up to the exhibition and those that she will add during the two months of its duration, using appropriation and register to underscore, through a subjective narration, the possibility of a plural history generated by personal experiences.

In this way, we have employed the archive as a method of ordering and organising knowledge and reality, so as to politically rethink and reorganise certain visual and conceptual orders. We could speak of a counter-archive as an open, dismountable, subjective and partial device, one that advances and rewinds –as a work involving a continuum of memory and re-elaboration demands- which is revealed as a potential way of establishing other more complex forms of representation of reality and other relation modes between the author and producer, on the one hand, and the visiting public on the other, which would reduce the distances existing between the two.

Total Work is set out in a discursive way based on a dynamic relation among artists, materials and their interaction with space, plus those elements that the different participating agents will contribute with their talks and presentations in the course of the exhibition. Thus, tools are suggested to the spectator for a critical reading, providing the means for him/her to appropriate this setting of work onwork.

(1)An exhibition (Barcelona, October 15 – December 7, 2003) curated by Montse Romaní in collaboration with artists Maria Ruido and Ursula Biemann.

About Writer: Montse Romani is a cultural producer based in Barcelona (Spain), with a major focus on curating and writing. She has worked extensively in the fields of post-Fordist work-conditions, self-organized cultural practices, the transformations of urban spaces, and visual culture. She was curator of several exhibitions, including Non Place Urban Realm (1999), Imaginando Identidades [Imagining Identities], (2000), Memòria Urbana i Espectacle [Urban Memory and the Spectacle] (2001), Total Work (2003), Tour-isms. The Defeat of Dissent (with Núria Enguita and Jorge Luis Marzo) (2004), What the hell does music have to do with industry and feminism in an art centre? (with Laurence Rassel/Constant) (2005). As a programmer, she collaborates with the International Women’s Film Festival, Barcelona since 2003. Is member of the artist group El Sueño Colectivo [The Collective Dream], with which she produced the video-essay Work Narratives (2005).

Yeni Film, No. 16, Nov. 2008

Mocumentaries can be considered as attempts at challenging the prevalent assumption of “seeing is believing”. Up until the mocumentary tradition, I think that in most of the documentaries we could talk about some kind of a quest for truth and objectivity, obviously mostly in expository mode, but also in observational mode etc. The documentaries having such a quest generally have a tendency of taking camera as an instrument which never lies. These assumptions remind me of three divergent schools of documentary; Kino-pravda of Dziga Vertov’s, realist school of John Grierson and the American Direct Cinema. Even though what these traditions understand from objectivity is very distinct from one another, in their styles we can talk about a scientific manner towards the world that they shoot. On the contrary to these traditions, mocumentaries can be said to be anti-scientific and in this tradition one can talk about a certain distance to this quest for objectivity. However, this is not to say that in these documentaries we cannot talk about truth. Rather truth is taken as contextual which depends on decisions and/or preferences.

This issue brings us to another interrelated issue of the presence of the filmmaker. On the contrary to the traditions mentioned above such as Griersonian school or the Direct Cinema Movement in which there is no trace of the filmmaker, in the mocumentaries such as Far From Poland (Jill Godmillow, 1984), the filmmaker is present to the fullest extent. In that sense, the point where the filmmaker stands gains an explicit importance and the quest for a purified and objective position towards the world is problematized once more. Rather than objectivity or universalism, multivocality and reflexivity become the basis of these documentaries. It can be pointed out that multiple voices, even the voice of the filmmaker is heard in Far From Poland.

In most of the documentaries coming before this tradition, there is the tendency of ignoring the process of documentary making. Even though there are instances of reflexivity in the early documentaries, for example in the Man with a Movie Camera, we cannot talk about a ‘reflexive’ stance in the proper sense of the word. I think that this is because even though Vertov situates himself in his film, he is still there as an independent ‘objective’ researcher. What differentiates the reflexive mode from the early modes of documentary the most is that, rather than seeing documentary as a means to measurement and observation, it is taken as an interpretative medium and accordingly its main aim is to interpret the daily life. In that sense relating the film itself with what is done behind the camera is an important step in order to turn the documentary to an interpretative medium rather than a medium for measurement. In that sense with this tradition the process of the film as a whole could be observed by the audience for the first time. For instance, in Far From Poland before we get into the depths of the film, we have a chance to see the filmmaker’s desk, her board and other material she uses for her film. As far as I am concerned, this makes the audience feel themselves comfortable and feel as if she is a human-being like them unlike other traditions of documentaries in which you feel yourself distanced from the filmmaker and the film. In that sense rather than appearing as untidy, these materials made me feel myself ‘at home’ in the film.

For Godard, despite its honesty, the camera loses two fundamental qualities: intelligence and sensibility with the American Direct Cinema. I think that with mocumentary and reflexive mode it regains what it has lost on its way. It regains an ironic attitude towards the world like the surrealist documentaries such as Luis Bunuel’s Los Hurdes. Even though Bunuel’s Los Hurdes was not a deliberately made mocumentary, its making fun of the conventional modes of documentary made it an early instance of mocumentary. However, mocumentaries run the risk of losing this Godardian intelligence and sensibility too if the filmmaker does not avoid to make foolish jokes out of his/her material. Because of their borderline character of documentary and tv shows, they might turn to consumption objects. At those instants they turn out to become one of the useless late night talk shows on TV which you can consume drinking your coca-cola and eating pop-corn. Rather than activating your mind, they might make you laugh in a stupid manner by making fun of people like Okan Bayülgen’s shows. At this point I think that an abuse of ethical issues comes into the picture as well. For example you might go and say that ‘I am going to make a documentary about you’ to someone and ask various questions to her and shoot her real life. But then you make it a mockery about documentary and make fun of that person and situation. This means that there might be an abuse of ethical rights and besides what you make is not consisted of irony or mockery but only contempt.

My first question is about the increasing popularity of the documentary. Do you agree that there is a boom in documentary and if so for what reason?

Yes and I think there are a range of reasons. Of course, one is the democratization of the cameras and all the editing equipment. They became both much cheaper and easier to handle. So, it is almost natural that we now see a boom in directors and new production companies investing specifically in this genre. And we should also not forget the role of recent European audiovisual policies. Furthermore, documentaries are a powerful tool both for reflecting upon the world, and especially in an image based society, and reflecting upon concepts such as reality, image, and so forth. Furthermore, in conceptual and formal terms, it is a quite open and malleable ground, that can be used not only to explore the potential of the cinematographic and artistic languages but to consider the nature of cinema itself.

You cited the reasons for Portugal but the boom for the documentaries is true for the whole world. Maybe the reason behind is the need for alternative channels for information away from the global actors. Do you think this is a kind of movement against globalization?

I am not sure that we can go so far as to say there is some movement against globalization; occasionally, yes, but the problem is always finding a way of presenting and discussing the works themselves, to circulate them — this is certainly not easy in Portugal. Regarding TV channels, as far as documentary is concerned, they tend to impose specific formats so any novelty or difference in approach is killed off from the start…

For example, in Turkey we have CNN Turk. The same major channels are everywhere they have the same format, the same misinformation. This creates its opposite in a dialectical way. Another reason is of course the drop in the price of equipment makes the situation convenient for filmmakers.

Yes, of course, but I think we must not forget the other side as well: today it is also a bit fashionable to make documentaries.

Is this true also for the feature films?

I don’t think so.

Are you going to do only documentaries or are you planning to make a fiction film?

This is an interesting question because when I started to study cinema I wanted to do fiction films; documentary was a completely distant area to me. It was a kind of out of coincidence that I started making documentaries. In the 90s, I received an invitation to make a documentary on Portuguese cinema between 1930 and 1945, a very relevant period of the dictatorship. It was my first experience with documentaries that used archive material. But it was not until the next documentary that I decided definitely to start making documentaries and to work on archival image in a completely different way to what I had been doing before. Regarding the fiction world, I do not rule it out but for me fiction will be always connected to documentaries. As a matter of fact, I am currently working on a project that lies on the borderline between fiction and documentary.

In all this boom, what are the subjects for documentaries in Portugal? Could you make a classification? We ask this question because we think that your documentary is exceptional.

It is always hard to make classifications because the subjects and the ways of filming them are quite diverse. We have documentaries about contemporary social and anthropological issues, biographical documentaries, especially about artists and writers, historical documentaries, etc, etc… As for the historical, generally the format is very typified: interviews, voice over and archive image used in illustration of the past. They follow a methodology close to the TV formats. On the other hand, we have seen a very strong line of observational documentaries. We have also more personal and experimental works. Although much rarer, they are significant within the Portuguese documentary panorama.

(My) First question about your film; did the idea or the material come first? Did you have the idea at the beginning?

Actually, the material came first. The idea for this documentary, Still Life, appeared the moment I first entered the archive of the political police. After having spent several days on reading files, I discovered quite a few huge albums containing hundreds of photographs of the political prisoners. I was rather impressed by the power of those images but at the same time I was not able to speak about them. I was left speechless. So in a way my film represents the translation of that moment.

The film footage is also from the police archive?

The film footage comes mainly from four sources: the political police, from RTP (the Portuguese state television channel), from ANIM (the National Archive of Moving Images) and the Army archives.

It seems as though discussion about the dictatorship in Portugal is alive at the moment.

Yes you are right. What we are witnessing, as Fernando Rosas, one of the most important Portuguese historians, usually puts it is a struggle for the hegemony of the memory. In other words, a struggle about what will be considered “real history” in the near future. As a matter of fact, there are two major opinions on the April 25th revolution and what it meant for Portuguese history. One camp says that revolution was as an uprising against an authoritarian regime based on oppression, violence and control of people’s mind and therefore positive. The other group – and in my opinion this interpretation is especially now growing stronger and stronger – claims that the revolution interrupted a transitional process towards democratic society. And this group of people correspondingly denies the violent aspect of the 48 years of Portuguese fascism and wants to keep it buried in the past.

And there is another problem. Out of natural causes, the generation of people who actually experienced the dictatorial regime and its real nature will be disappearing sooner rather than later. And this means that the elites in the academic, artistic, social and cultural field will dictate the collective memory of the past and the witnesses who could actually say that these times were different will no longer be alive.

One classic example of what I am trying to say here is the building that used to be the former headquarters of the political police, a very powerful place and symbolic of the regime. This place where many people were tortured, is to be transformed into luxury flats. In other words, this place that serves as an ideal point on which to anchor memory will be erased and made forgotten.

Indeed, this process of erasing our own memory is wrapped up in the subject of our next film.

What was the discussion around the film in Portugal given this situation?

Still Life – Natureza Morta

To me it was rather shocking because when the film was shown, the first reaction from the film critics was to dismiss it. They almost denied its existence declaring “this is not a documentary, this is a film without words, this is a film without contextualization, an anachronism”. (As a matter of fact, those were the very fundamental principals of the film!) One film critic even said that the devil should take this film which in Portuguese is really rather an unpleasant expression.

It is a kind of hate.

Yes, the reactions were rather aggressive.

They don’t want to see these images maybe. But how do intellectuals find the film?

Of course we also had positive reactions, some very positive. We had good film reviews; the problem was that they came later.

Another question here is the fact that in Portugal we don’t discuss such things deeply. I mean, there is nothing that could be called a real “public space”. This idea was very well expressed by the Portuguese philosopher José Gil in his book, Portugal Today: the Fear of Existing. When a cultural object (book, film, etc.) enters into the public space it undergoes treatment on multiple layers that in turn transforms it so that by the time the work returns to its author it has already become a new object. It has been thought about, discussed and its meaning has become broader. My film, when it returned to me after some weeks of exhibition, felt like nothing: It was as if I was holding a blind zombie in my arms!

“Whether this is a documentary or not” was not subject to discussion.

I agree. There was never much real discussion about the important issues apart from debates that were organized during the theatrical release.

What were the results of the dictatorship, how many people died, how many suffered?

This is not any mere question of quantification. It is more a question of how the dictatorship still continues to exist in the minds of people. No doubt many political prisoners were brutally tortured and some were killed. And there was a long lasting colonial war, with many dead and left incapacitated, which is still a trauma for many Portuguese. And there were certainly battalions of informers whose identity and exact number will never be known.

There must be some estimates.

No, there are no official numbers apart from the dead from the colonial war. Only recently has the first PhD dissertation on the political police been completed. However, more important than the numbers is the way the regime affected the whole population.

How did that regime end?

Salazar got old and literally fell off his chair. He died from the subsequent brain stroke. He was substituted by Marcelo Caetano. Six years later, Caetano was overthrown by the Carnation Revolution.

Why did you decide to make your film silent? On the other hand the music of the film was very particular.

For me, this is also the result of a reflection on image and history. The question is how history can be shown through documentary. What is usually done in historical documentaries is to build a logical discourse that tends to explain the past. We tend to follow the words and mostly don’t pay real attention to the images. They are just there to carry the narrative and, even worse, the spectator frequently ends up by confusing an image of an event in the past with the actual event.

So, another important aspect of this film was the assumption that an event in the past can never be an objective fact — it is always a fact of memory. The idea of an objective past fact is an epistemological myth. In my perspective, this was one the most important principles to this film. I’m not trying to find a truth in the past and bring this truth into the present. I wanted to make a reflection on the past while also dealing with the memory and with all the knowledge of the present. In this sense, the film is also a reflection on the present.

Regarding the use of archive material, one of my intentions was the questioning of the image itself. My intent was to show images without any pressure from the words, without a speech that commands how we read what we see. Like Didi-Huberman said —the French philosopher whose thesis inspired my work — there is always a dilemma: either you know or you see. The ideal is a dialectic relationship between both. But from the beginning, my option was to move into the field of ‘to see’ so that we didn’t lose the real image. Within this framework of ideas, it was no longer possible to locate the image in terms of time and space and follow a chronology. This is why I left out the words completely.

Did you use the images and footage chronologically?

No, I had a kind of a main chronology: the first years of the dictatorship and its peak, the post-war period, including Portugal joining NATO, the colonial war of the 1960s and then the revolution of April 1974. But the film itself is not chronological and it doesn’t follow any linear narrative sequence – this was another essential element in its construction and the role of the music was essential to building this structure.

I have to say that the editing was the most difficult part of the whole process because editing the material I had gathered was like dealing with a kaleidoscope. Whenever I changed an image in the film, the entire film suddenly became different. And then you start realizing that you can do whatever you want with an image: should you want to, that image can say “a” just as easily as it can say “b”. So, it was difficult to get images interacting in a way that did not subvert their meaning. But the whole point of the editing was to penetrate in and open up the image and not to direct the viewer to read it in any unequivocal way. When looking at Eisenstein’s third image, that strikes the spectator’s spirit through the juxtaposition of the two images, you understand that it is a controlled image. On the other hand, the third image in Godard is not subject to narrative issue or any prior desire of the direct to induce any specific reading on a context specific to the film. Much depends on the spectator, the understanding, their own memories… I think this is a point shared with a certain kind of contemporary films that reflect on the actual nature of the image.

I think also that the dialectics of Godard’s cinema are closer to your film. It is really a creative narration. You are taking the side of your narration. The faces, details, eyes… You created an atmosphere. Another part was the slow motion usage of the footage. You gave time for the audience to think. It completes the idea. Some documentaries claim that they are objective especially documentaries using archives but it always depends on the filmmaker depending on the image is used. For example, I remember the documentary about the Spanish civil war, “El Perro Negro: Stories from the Spanish Civil War”. The director used the archive of a rich man and tries to pull away from the two sides fighting. As a result, he began to support the right wing, the winners of the war. On the other hand I criticize the film because I am taking sides. Your attitude is very different.

Of course I am not indifferent, I take a side. If another director had worked those images it would have been a completely different film. However, one of my principals was never to subvert the image itself. This was one of the greatest difficulties I encountered. Even without using a single word through editing you can construct whatever the discourse, even contradictory, from those images. This is why some of the aesthetical options I took in the film were a consequence of my ethical self-restrictions.