January 29th, 2017. Chinese New Year. In Paris, the traditional festivities which take place in the XIIIth arrondissement are suppressed “for security reason”. Since this summer, before our eyes, Turkey is turning into a dictatorship as fast as the ice cap is melting. As in the 1930s in Europe, should we again see how rapidly the achievements of culture and education can be swept away? This blog is ending as Trumpery is spreading a new storm of chaos, falsification, racism, egoism, self-satisfied ignorance and cruelty all over the world. Since the end of WWII and its promises of reconstruction, how did we regress so quickly? What has to be done, with the weapons of art?

Macbeth, Satan, Death and the author, set photography of Shakespeare Must Die,
Ing K (2013). ©Ing K.

With her usual Witz and energy, the filmmaker Ing K, who for almost 40 years struggles daily against oppression in Thailand, through her blog “Bangkok Love Letter” sends some news and metaphorical principles about censorship and self-censorship.

” In the Thai art world it’s the end of an era too—let’s say the end of Chapter 2 of Thai contemporary art (Bhirasri Institute* having been Chapter 1), with the imminent closure of Chulalongkorn University Art Center, which held its last opening party on January 19 for its last exhibition, ‘Acknowledgement’, a group show of 50 artists who have displayed there since its founding in 1995. The Art Center manager, Ajarn Suebsang Sangwachirapiban, giggled to me, “I wasted time worrying over your work [portrait of Chit Singhaseni’s widow**]—turns out the only problem we’ve had was with Ajarn Apinan’s.” He meant Apinan Poshyananda, the founding director of the Art Center himself, and newly retired Permanent Secretary (#1 bureaucrat) of the Ministry of Culture. Alas it wasn’t the ministry that has blacked out words that form a part of his work, but self-censorship by university eminences.

(…)

Trump, Duterte, Thaksin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini: by their fateful impact these are no ordinary humans like you & me but irresistible forces of destiny, acquiring their exquisitely appropriate form from the emanations of the masses’ secret fears & desires. They have been woven by us from our nightmares to embody our darkest self, which can then be exorcised. As anyone knows who’s ever seen an exorcism movie, you can’t expel the demon until you know its true name.

Like many filmmakers who’ve nursed the fantasy of making an exorcism movie, I’ve done some research for such a script. All sources & traditions seem to agree: Rule #1: Never be tempted to argue or debate with the demon, especially on abstractions & philosophy. He is the master of deception who will weaken & confound you. Rule #2: Focus all your will on forcing the demon to reveal its true face & name. Rule #3: Expel the demon in the name of something sacred, never arrogantly rely on your own powers or make it personal, otherwise disaster strikes. (Let’s see what the obsessive occult fact-checker says about that.)

The cock is crowing. Awake, arise & shine, my friend. Happy Chinese New Year of the Rooster to you, though it might turn out to be an entirely different animal. I overheard a talking head on TV call it the Year of the Fire Swan (“Hongse Fai”). The heedless man might lick his lips, anticipating a delicious outcome, ie. Gai Yang barbecued chicken. But the talking head explained this meant the Phoenix, when long-buried & apparently dead people, stories, secrets & cold cases rise from the ashes. Good luck with that, my dear. Here’s to hoping you haven’t buried anyone or anything that’s still alive.”***

My deepest thanks to Marta Gili, Marta Ponsa and Adrien Chevrot for their generous invitation, to Brad Stevens for his translations, to the readers of this blog, to the admirable artists Bani Khoshnoudi, Ing K, Jocelyne Saab, Tan Pin Pin for the light they introduce into the world. And to grant us a last glassful of courage in these twilight times, let us never forget the meta-hegelian viaticum offered by a brilliant slayer of tyrants and bureaucrats, one of those who, like René Vautier, up to now has won all his fights, the situationist sinologist, publisher, filmmaker and winegrower René Viénet: ” The bird of Minerva reserves its surprises at nightfall “. (Can Dialectics break bricks?, 1972).

René Viénet, poster for Les Filles de Ka-Ma-Ré (1974), collection of the author. ©René Viénet.

L’article “Censorship is a symptom of an insecure society, right? “ est apparu en premier sur Each Dawn a Censor Dies.

Tan Pin Pin. Photo: Karine Azoub

Filmmaker, photographer and artist Tan Pin Pin is among the great contemporary voices of the art scene in Singapore, the city state to which most of her output has been devoted. Her work initially impresses through its formal diversity, unfailingly offering the radicalisation of a filmic resource: a record of the exhumation and removal of a tomb (belonging to the director’s grandparents) in the name of rapid urbanisation – Moving House (version one, 1997) – rubs shoulders with the immolation of a Barbie doll in Microwave (2000); a 38-minute sequence shot crossing the island taken from the Pan Island Expressway – 80km / h (2003) – is followed by a pointillist portrait of the city through its banned songs and dialects in Singapore Gaga (2005); a strictly visual kinetic collage of footage from television archives showing four decades of national celebration – 9th August (2006) – gives way to a strictly textual semantic interrogation of the word “remember” in Thesaurus (2012). If every one of these films boasts its own unique formal apparatus, they are all energised by the same critical task of describing, safeguarding and promoting a multi-ethnic Singapore, one that remains both multi-cultural and fraternal in the face of the government’s coercive standardisation policies. Moving House (version two, 2001), Gravedigger’s Luck (2003), Invisible City (2007), The Impossibility of Knowing (2010) and Yangtze Scribbler (2012) all confront death, from the results of criminal lives to the sometimes tiny vestiges human existence leaves behind, as well as providing support for those in danger of simply vanishing without trace. Such a sense of responsibility to collective history, which carries living individuals and dead bodies along with it like wisps caught in a whirlwind, actively seeks out every possible visual and aural means of first countering the Singapore authorities’ artificially imposed view of progress as a forced march away from independence, then repairing the damage caused to collective memory, culture and emotion.

From her first short film, Lurve Me Now (1999), an erotic fantasy involving two Barbie dolls – anticipating Albertina Carri’s Barbie también puede estar triste (‘Barbie Gets Sad Too’, 2001), shot in Argentina two years later – Tan Pin Pin has endured censorship. Her first documentary to achieve international success, Singapore Gaga, encountered censorship problems simply because the use of an ambiguous word in Malay – “animals” – at first caused it to be labelled a “threat to national security.” But with To Singapore, With Love (2013), which gave voice to Singapore’s political exiles, the entire film was banned, an act of prohibition which has not only been maintained to this day, but also extended to all distribution media.

Tan Pin Pin has made all her films available on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/tanpinpin
A useful list of films censored in Singapore

Nicole Brenez
Translated by Brad Stevens

Nicole Brenez: Can you tell us about your family background, education, artistic environment? Did your education in Law at Oxford, UK, helped you to confront situations of censorship?

Tan Pin Pin: I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s Singapore, at a time where economic imperatives trumped all other imperatives. The whole nation was marshaled into wealth creation and improving our GDP. My growing up years were surrounded by songs such as “Good better best, never let it rest!” Though our material quality of life improved quickly, civil rights were suspended. For example I found out recently while researching To Singapore, with Love, that over 800 people were arrested under the Internal Security Act in the 1970’s alone, a huge percentage for a small population of 2.3 million. In the days before the Internet, the arrests went under the radar, people simply disappeared or were later exiled. There is so much in the 1970’s that remains unaccounted for in the Singapore story.

My parents were the first few in their families to go to university. They were architects so we had a very interesting childhood spending weekends visiting construction sites. I went to state schools where art had a very small part in the curriculum. In my teens, I discovered the BBC World Service on the FM dial. By the time, I finished secondary school, I knew I wanted to get out of Singapore to go to England where it seemed more free and more humane.

I won a scholarship to study law at Oxford University, law for no particular reason other than I was more likely to secure a Singapore scholarship with that course. At Oxford, I discovered photography and art books in the city library. Within the first semester, I knew I was in the wrong course, I should have gone to art school instead. But I decided to finish the course to keep my scholarship. Meanwhile, I spent all my free time taking photos and developing prints in the dark room. If I had not left Singapore, I am not sure I would be making films today. In those striven times, art-making was too frivolous an undertaking and I would have had no support.

I was a lawyer for six days before I left the profession. In fact, I made my first film, Moving House (1996) as a trainee lawyer. Through the law course, I understood how power comes to be and is devolved. I also learnt the difference between being legally right and morally right. In Singapore, the two are sometimes very far apart.

NB: What was your first encounter with Singaporean censorship? Can you explain the alleged reasons? Did you made any cut in the film?

TPP: My first encounter with Singapore censorship and self-censorship was meeting the first opposition Member of Parliament, the legendary J.B. Jeyaretnam [Leader of the Workers’ Party, center-left, from 1971 to 2001] on the street in the 1990’s. Through a series of defamation suits by the PAP [People’s Action Party, center-right, ruling the country continuously since 1959] leaders, he became bankrupt so he couldn’t run for office. I saw him on the street, ringing a bell, selling copies of his Party’s publication, I wanted to buy a copy but I was too scared to be seen doing that, as if I would be guilty by association, of what, I wasn’t sure.

To this day, the sight of this solitary man seeking out a space to speak, and my woeful avoidance of him still haunts me. Later, two Singapore film lecturers made a short documentary about him, Vision of Persistence [2002, by Kai Sing, Mirabelle Ang and Christina Mok]. The film was mysteriously pulled out from the Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF) last minute. I heard the filmmakers were threatened and the film has disappeared.

My first personal encounter of censorship was for a student short I made, Lurve Me Now (1999). It was slated to show at SIFF. It featured a Barbie doll being felt up by a hand amidst heavy breathing. The film was banned by the censors for, of all things, its sound track. Censorship through a direct film ban, through redacting Chinese dialects in the mass media in the late 1970’s or through the sudden withdrawal of the Vision of Persistence, was all it took to render the something non-existent. I did not make any recuts for the censors, it did not occur to me to bend to their will.

NB: When you decided to shoot To Singapore, With Love (2013), were you already aware that your documentary will endure banning?

TPP: I did not start out to make this documentary. Like many of my other films, To Singapore, with Love took shape organically. I was making a video about Singapore’s coastline from afar. In the process of researching the idea of being outside, I stumbled upon Escape from the Lion’s Paw [Escape from the Lion’s Paw: Reflections of Singapore’s Political Exiles, Soh Lung Teo, Yit Leng Low, Singapore, Function 8, 2012], a book of first-person accounts by Singapore political exiles, people who remain outside the country, but not by choice. I decided to interview one of them, Dr. Ang Swee Chai, based in London, who by chance was in nearby Malaysia at that time. I was so moved by her account of exile that I decided to change focus and To Singapore, with Love was born. Later, I interviewed eight more exiles in London, Malaysia and Thailand. Some have not been back for more than 50 years. They talk about why they left, but they mostly talk about their lives today and their relationship with Singapore. They were of different political persuasions and different generations of activists. Some were communists, some were student activists, others were from the Christian Left.

I made this film because I myself wanted to better understand Singapore. I wanted to understand how we became who we are by addressing what was banished and unspoken for. I was also hoping that the film would open up a national conversation to allow us to understand ourselves as a nation better too.

I realised that this film could be banned when I was editing. Two films featuring former long-term political detainees talking about their detention without trial by another Singaporean director, Martyn See, were banned too [Said Zahari: 17 years, 2007, about Said Zahari ; Lim Hock Siew, 2010]. I knew that any suggestion that the Internal Security Act was used to detain and silence political opponents (rather than just communists) would be problematic to the state’s cleaned up version of the Singapore story.

Though fearful, I finished the film, partly inspired by the idealism of the people I had interviewed. I only exhaled when I sent the film out of the country. It premiered at Busan International Film Festival. In the end, the film was indeed banned because it was a “threat to national security”.

NB: Did all the exiles you wish to interview agreed to be filmed? Were they under surveillance?

TPP: The people I contacted all agreed to be filmed. I had sent them my older films so that they could get a sense of my work. I am not sure if they are under surveillance. They have been away from Singapore for more that 35 to 50 years.

NB: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong declared: “the political exiles featured in the documentary should not be allowed the chance to air their own ‘self-serving’ accounts of the fight against communism”. Is it usual in Singapore that a PM makes public comments about a film?

TPP: The bedrock of the Singapore narrative is built upon her fight against the communists more than 50 years ago. Using all the laws and armory at our disposal, we won that war and look how far we have come today. Hence it behooved Prime Minister, when queried, to justify the ban using the same Cold War rhetoric that the modern Singapore state was built upon.

The film’s main subtext, that in certain cases, the state overused its powers to silence political opponents was not addressed. Instead, the PM and all the government responses harped on the crimes committed by communists (which those interviewees who were communists did not deny) totally ignoring the substance of the film, which shows what a self-serving act of censorship the ban was.

The PM also said that my film was “one-sided”. I do not believe that balance or neutrality are useful ways to think about history, especially Singapore history. I am interested in providing alternatives. In fact these alternatives ‘balance’ out the dominant accounts propagated by textbooks and state propaganda.

The whole event clarified for me that we do not own our history. Films are banned or disappear, archives even those relating to events that happened more than 50 years ago are out of bounds, all to protect the official version of our history.

NB: A collective of 350 Singaporean organized a travel in Malaysia to attend a screening of To Singapore, With Love. Can you tell us about such an event? Is your film still prohibited in Singapore, even through the internet?

TPP: If one wants to learn about the reach of power in Singapore, they could study the immediate aftermath of this ban.

The film was originally slated to world premiere with my other films Invisible City (2007) and Singapore GaGa (2005) in a triple-bill organised by National University of Singapore (NUS). When the ban was announced, the university remained silent even though they were the organisers of the presentation. In less dysfunctional democracies, the organisers would be the first to speak for the film.

Instead, on the same day, 40 leading artists, filmmakers and civil society activists, most of whom had not seen the film, spoke for the film with a short statement asking the censors to reconsider the ban and to allow different expressions of our past.

A week later, several twenty something civil society activists, using social media, found anonymous donors and chartered coaches to go to neighbouring Johor Bahru, Malaysia, to watch the film where it was slated to screen at the Freedom Film Festival (FFF). So one afternoon, more than 350 Singaporeans crossed the border, curious to see what the fuss was about. FFF is a small travelling human rights festival. To cope with the unexpected swell in numbers, they opened more screening rooms throughout the hotel. We had to use bed sheets to erect screens and borrow extra projectors. I never would have imagined a Singapore film premiere (in Malaysia!) such as this, but at the same time I felt glad that Singaporeans marched with their feet to go where Singapore laws cannot reach to find out for themselves.

Today, the film can screen privately in Singapore, but public and ticketed screenings are forbidden, DVDs cannot be sold here too. The film can screen overseas, so apart from the festival circuit, Singaporeans overseas have also organized public screenings in Australia, Hong Kong, UK, USA and Canada. Singaporean students in USA and London have also organised campus tours of the film.

It can be seen online on the Vimeo VOD site, but if you access it from Singapore, you will see a “Not available in your region” message. The censors prohibited me to let those with Singapore IP addresses have access.

NB: How do you feel about the future of Singapore, which, in a way, is the time set in your new work, Pineapple Town (2015)?

TPP: Pineapple Town is a short film that was commissioned to celebrate 50 years of Singapore’s Independence. In the film, a mother tries to find out more about her adopted baby’s past. The final part of the film is set in the future where the adoptive mother brings her young daughter to visit the little Malaysian town where she was born to acknowledge her past, even the troubled bits. The film is hopeful, it shows it is ok to face up to the past, not bury it.

NB: Would you have an advice to formulate for filmmakers in repressive or even dictatorial situations from all over the world?

TPP : I proffer this advice that was given by Dr. Poh Soo Kai at his book launch. He is a former political detainee who was featured in To Singapore, with Love. His book is called Life in a Time of Deception [Function 8 Ltd and Pusat Sejarah Rakyat, 2016].

He quotes from Paul A. Baran [Professor of Economics at Stanford University], who said in 1931, in the looming spectre of Hitler: “And if the tribulations of the political humdrum and the disappointments of our last decade have caused many of you to desire some political tranquility, to desire a vacation from politics, you must repress this attack of weakness with all your might. This desertion from the political battleground is the greatest crime against humanity that one can commit, because the others, the reactionary backwards striving forces never quit, never allow themselves a vacation from politics. And if you, infuriated and embittered, now renounce the political struggle; if you sulkily stand off to the side with a dismissive wave of your hand; then you leave the politics to the others; then you subject yourself to their domination.”

Official website
http://www.tosingaporewithlove.com
Full account of the ban
http://sensesofcinema.com/2015/documentary-in-asia/to-singapore-with-love-documentary/

Paris-Singapore, March 2016.
Deep thanks to Silke Schmikle.

L’article TAN PIN PIN. NO VACATION FROM POLITICS. est apparu en premier sur Each Dawn a Censor Dies.

I was hosting a pop music programme on national Lebanese radio called Les Marsupilamis ont les yeux bleus (‘Marsupilami Got Blue Eyes’), and had seen the film Mondo Cane (Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, 1962): I suggested making a news journal of a similar type, and searched through the AFP’s files for information on strange things happening around the world. This was in 1970. One day, I arrived at the radio station and was informed my show had been cancelled. A journalist later told me I had violated the station’s rules. Outraged that the broadcasters had banned me for no good reason, I went on air anyway, informing listeners that although I had been silenced, Marsupilami would always have blue eyes.

2. Lebanese Television

After Jordan’s Black September, I worked for Lebanese television with Jörg Stocklin. I was told not to mention anything involving the Israelis and the Palestinians. I protested, pointing out that we had demonstrated alongside the Palestinians in 1969. It seemed that the only journalist permitted to address these issues was the one who received a weekly envelope filled with money from Saudi Arabia.

In 1973, Palestinian refugees were bombed in Lebanon. We went up on the roofs and saw planes dropping bombs, decimating entire neighbourhoods. There were Palestinian Fedayeen fighters in the streets. I knew I couldn’t continue working for a television station whose leaders refused to publicly acknowledge the presence of Palestinian fighters in the camps or the problems faced by refugees.

3. Egypt: a first warning

I left Lebanon and came to work in France. The October War began in Egypt, and a general declared, “no women are allowed at the front.” Out of 400 journalists, there were three women, including Rosy Rouleau (photojournalist and co-founder of the Sygma agency) and me. Once war had been declared, everything was Islamized, putting religion in the forefront and women in prison. I learned a lot from that.

4. Iraqi Kurdistan: cutting

I left Iraqi Kurdistan to do a report for the magazine 52 minutes. In order to bring back images, I crossed the border by car and deliberately allowed myself to be kidnapped. Official censorship reared its ugly head, and the Iraqi embassy, which maintained excellent relations with France, requested that images of the abduction be withdrawn. I have seen these images in the archives of INA (the French National Audiovisual Institute), but the report was circulated without them.

5. French press: defamation

Sometimes I walked between the raindrops, managing to remain invisible. In 1974, I made Le Front du Refus (aka ‘Les Commandos-suicides’ or ‘Suicide Commandos’), a documentary about young Palestinian fighters, 15 or 16 years old, who had lost their land and joined the resistance against Israel. The report was broadcast on Antenne 2 in July 1975, and seen everywhere. But the French press was offended, and claimed these Palestinian adolescents were Nazis, which, of course, is absurd – they were simply saluting their flag. Calling them Nazis was the easiest way to deny the legitimacy of their struggle, a political horror of the very worst kind.

6. French Television: refusal to broadcast

In 1973, I made Les Femmes palestiniennes (‘Palestinian Women’) for Antenne 2. I wanted to disseminate images of these women, Palestinian fighters in Syria, who had so little. This was just before Sadat’s visit to Israel, and the situation was very tense. While I was cutting the film at my local Antenne 2 station, Paul Nahon, who at that time headed the foreign news division, grabbed me by the collar and dragged me out of the editing room. Les Femmes palestiniennes was never screened. I have deposited a copy with the French Film Archives at Bois d’Arcy.

7. Lebanon: camera destroyed

In 1975, a most unexpected event. I decided to make a film about the war in Lebanon, Le Liban dans la Tourmente (‘Lebanon in a Whirlwind’), giving a voice to all parties: Communists, Phalangists, etc. As with the other groups, I asked the Phalangists for access to their training camps. When their young leader, Bashir Gemayel, refused me, I turned to his father, Pierre Gemayel, who was a friend of my father. In collaboration with Eric Rouleau and Rosy Rouleau, I filmed the Phalangists parading in the Lebanese mountains – they’d been trained in Israel. While we were riding in a car, a Pahalangist attacked me and grabbed my hair. Rosy immediately came to my aid, breaking one of her ribs in the process. Our 16mm camera was destroyed, and the footage recorded by it lost, so we ended up using photographs taken by Rosy in the film instead. I could hardly believe it was possible for me to be beaten up simply because I was doing my job as a journalist. I became aware of my fragility. That day, I felt myself merging with imagery of the war, and this feeling has never left me. It was as if I were a stone which had been destroyed in this destroyed country. Before this, I was a frail young girl, well-educated, who had nothing in common with the commandos. But this act of aggression obliged me to choose sides, even though I was still willing to listen to everybody. So for a while, I became committed to the struggle. My father, who had obtained this appointment for me, was furious. Lebanon was already a country in which a state of war existed between various communities.

The French and British press revealed their prejudices by reversing the meaning of the images. They made it seem as if the Christian Phalangists were civilised and the Palestinians barbaric. But only the Phalangists attacked a young woman for no reason and censored the images she had created by breaking her camera. Such a censorship, enforced by physical violence, did not prevent me from finishing the film, which was shown in cinemas but not on television (TV channels being effectively controlled by the Christian Lebanese). In France, it was screened at the Olympic Entrepôt art cinema.

8. Lebanon: first death threats

On April 13, 1975, the anniversary of the first Palestinian massacre, 27 passengers were killed on a hijacked bus in Beirut. This resulted in an outbreak of civil war. In 1976, after another outbreak, three more of my films were shown on French television: Les Enfants de la guerre (‘Children of War’), Sud-Liban – Histoire d’un village (‘South Lebanon – The Story of a Village’), and Beyrouth, jamais plus (‘Beirut, Never Again’). Les Enfants de la guerre, which attested to the horrific massacre of Palestinians in la Quarantaine, a district of Beirut, displeased the Phalangists. During a televised debate on the civil war, I didn’t hesitate to reveal the truth and respond to Moshe Dayan’s claims concerning la Quarantaine. One morning, I was reading a newspaper and came across a caricature of me, blindfolded. It was a death threat. This was terrifying. I bought every copy of this newspaper I could find in Hamra and threw them in the trash. But I kept two copies, so as to remember this violence. I spent two days in bed, hiding under the sheets until my fear subsided. Then I began to feel jaded.

Beirut was divided in two. Concealed under a blanket in the backseat of a car, I went to see my father in the Christian district, returned by way of Byblos, toured Lebanon’s Muslim section, and came back to Beirut. These trips through some magnificent landscapes restored me, and refreshed my point of view.

9. Egypt, Sweden: first ban, first night in prison

In 1976, Beirut collapsed, and I went to Egypt to shoot a film without authorisation or intention. At this time, activists of the Arab left, such as Khaled Mohieddine (a member of the Revolutionary Command Council), were acting particularly bravely; although they could have been imprisoned for a single word, they thought, created, sang, filmed. I learned so much from them; they were simultaneously artists and politicians, totally involved in both life and the revolutionary struggle. I visited many members of the Egyptian left, notably Mohamed Sid Ahmed, a journalist, former communist activist and political figure who in 1976 helped co-found the Parti du Rassemblement (the Tagammu), which included Marxist thinkers and Nasserists of the left, and Loutfi al-Kholi, screenwriter of Youssef Chahine’s The Sparrow (1972) and The Return of the Prodigal Son (1976), a great friend of Bernadette Lafont. I filmed Ahmad Fouad Nagm, a magnificent poet who had spent 18 years in prison, and his friend Cheikh Imam, a revolutionary singer. At the same time, I made Égypte, la cité des morts (‘Egypt, City of the Dead’), dealing with that strange process by which shop windows in Egypt were suddenly full of luxury products intended solely for consumption by a small wealthy class, while everyone else was dying of hunger. This was the beginning of globalisation. Without a second thought, I was shooting the City of the Dead, which for me was more attractive than the rest of Cairo. At this time, my films were being shown all over the world, but the only complaint I received came from the Egyptian Embassy in Sweden. Loutfi al-Kholi telephoned me, saying “but Jocelyne, you have betrayed us!” He watched the film in an assembly hall in the thirteenth district, and did not understand why it should interest anyone in Sweden. It was later explained that the City of the Dead is on the pilgrims’ passage to Mecca; associating this holy place with revolutionary poets such as Ahmad Fouad Nagm and Cheikh Imam offended some believers, who complained to Sweden’s cultural attaché. As a result, I was banned from entering Egypt for seven years, a ban eventually lifted on October 6, 1981, the day Sadat was assassinated. Yet when I returned to Egypt two years later, I was stopped and taken to a cell in the airport, where I spent a whole night. It seems I was still on the blacklist, or some “redlist”. I could not speak for three days. What did I do to deserve such mistreatment? My body was banned, as well as my mind. It was very difficult. I understand today that this was the origin of Dunia, this feature film which also occupied seven years of my life.

10. Sahara, Morocco: second night in prison

After Egypt, I travelled to the Sahara. I went there as a professional journalist, a career I had abandoned before Le Liban dans la Tourmente, and ended up making Le Sahara n’est pas à vendre (‘The Sahara is Not for Sale’, 1977), which dealt with the conflict between Algerians, Moroccans, and the Polisario Front of the Sahrawi people. I requested the necessary authorizations, since I again wanted to talk to all the parties involved, especially the Tuaregs, the last knights of the desert. The shoot was exciting and challenging. The cinematographer responsible for the first part, Arnaud Hamelin, took a bullet in the hand. I filmed all these young fighters, little more than adolescents, assuming the leaders of the Polisario Front were elsewhere; but no, these youngsters were really the ones in charge. The film was released in Paris, and received excellent reviews, but censorship always emerges when least expected. There was an outcry in the Moroccan press, and I was accused of treason. It is, it seems, forbidden to say something every historian knows; that there were Sahrawi tribes in the Western Sahara long before the kingdom of Morocco existed. Today, they occupy Islamic territory.

Seventeen years after shooting Le Sahara n’est pas à vendre, I returned to Morocco to attend a film festival near Tangier. Feeling carefree, I rented a car so I could travel with my four-year-old son. At one point, the driver began trembling, and decided to stop at a gas station, at which point the car caught fire. I hailed a ride and returned to the festival, where I was under the protection of Youssef Chahine. I planned to depart from Tangiers airport the next day, but when I arrived there, I was stopped. I gave some money to a guard, who let me call the French embassy. I was subsequently freed, but stopped again upon arriving at Casablanca airport, where I spent my second night in prison.

11. French Television: arbitrary suppression

In July 1982, the Israeli army’s siege of Beirut began. I made Beyrouth, ma ville (‘Beirut, My City’) for France 3, but didn’t bother watching it when it was broadcast. Only recently did I look at the film online, and discover it had been changed without my permission, my voiceover was supressed. My thoughts, my walk, my body in the city more than ever belonged to the war. How can someone cut that? Even today, I can hardly believe French television dared rework my film and broadcast it in this form.

12. Egypt: censorship before shooting

In 1985, I returned to Egypt to make six reports for an FR3 programme called Taxi. One of these reports dealt with the Islamic bank – Who controlled it? Who financed it? But I was refused permission to meet certain interviewees, and was compelled to seek out others. Paralysed by the information services, I could not shoot my film.

Thanks to this experience, when I came to make Les Almées (‘The Almeh’) for Canal + in 1989, and was placed under surveillance once more because the Egyptian government did not want images of these very free women to be disseminated, I found ways to shoot clandestinely.

13. Vietnam: filming under surveillance

In 1998, I decided to visit Vietnam and make a documentary about Dr Quong Quyen Hoa. Dr Hoa was a student in France, an adherent of the French Communist Party, who had been imprisoned in Vietnam in 1960, joined the maquis for seven years in 1968, and became the Minister for Health in the southern Provisional Revolutionary Government. She left the party in 1974, denouncing its corruption and tyranny, and had since been under intense scrutiny by the Communist government. She was a model for me. We entered the country without visas, and resided in a house that belonged to Dr Hoa’s family. The police searched this house soon after we started shooting. We moved the Beta videotapes we were using and hid them with Dr Hoa. Upon leaving, we presented two unused tapes to customs. In order to send the other tapes to France without taking the risk of their being intercepted by the border police, Dr. Hoa used Claude Blanchemaison, who was a diplomat at the Quai d’Orsay at the time she was in the maquis. I was overwhelmed by the faithfulness built thanks to the maquis solidarity and still lasting so long after the war. Thanks to Claude’s diplomatic bag, our tapes arrived safely in France, and I was able to start editing La Dame de Saïgon (‘The Lady of Saigon’), which was broadcast first on France 2, then on TV5 Monde, where it was seen by everyone in Vietnam.

14. Egypt: censorship before and after shooting, more death threats

Dunia, completed in 2005, took up seven years of my life in total. This film faced censorship at every step, and all kinds of obstacles – legal, economic, corporate – were placed in its path. I had wanted to show how women were prevented from enjoying life. In 2002, I asked a bookseller friend to investigate the sexuality of young Egyptians. When the answers to the questionnaires arrived, she was very disturbed; they were written in a pornographic style, since even in Egypt the language of love is very rich. The bookseller refused to enter these answers onto her computer, so I collected the questionnaires and gave them to a writer with a view to making a film about female circumcision, a terrible custom that occurs not only in Egypt, but throughout Africa. I wrote the screenplay in a Lebanese dialect and sent it to the Egyptian censorship board, which banned it. This left me with no recourse except the Supreme Court of the State, which was already infiltrated by the forces of fundamentalism. After proceedings which lasted three years, I finally obtained a filming permit. But I did not yet have any money for the shoot. The script had already been circulated to several film magazines, which had printed it without my permission, I felt dispossessed. Without a producer or an actor to collaborate with, the project was too risky. I finally found a producer who accepted because I offered him a good salary and because he had not made a film in ten years. The lead actress, who had been in prison for prostitution, was found by my friend the choreographer Walid Aouni. During filming, I received telephone threats every night, usually around two or three in the morning. My birthday fell towards the end of the shoot; the actress used some sugar to create a portrait of me on the birthday cake, then took a large knife and cut off the portrait’s head! While editing, I learned that the trade unions had been instructed not to give me any rights, such as those for music. When the film was ready for distribution, I was denied the authorization to project it, the pretext being that I was a foreigner. I had to plead with each union director before finally getting the necessary papers. We were so poor we ate at the Secours Populaire (a charitable organisation). ART, a Saudi Arabian television channel, eventually purchased the film, but did so only because they wanted to prevent it being more widely shown. We released the film on video in the normal way, but never received any money from it.

At the Cairo Festival, I carried the 35mm reels myself, since I didn’t want to risk their being confiscated. There was a huge crowd waiting outside the screening room, and an aggressive press waiting for me inside. During the post-screening debate, I was labelled an atheist, a danger to the nation, a prostitute. I explained that I only wanted to defend women. I was subsequently invited to take part in a television debate, broadcast in prime time, where a journalist viciously attacked me. Maybe because I recently suffered from a brain stroke, I defended myself very openly and frankly, and soon became as famous as the President of the Republic. But the film took two years to come out, I was never paid, and even the cinema programmer at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris refused to screen it at the time, in 2005/2006. In short, we discovered that what was at stake was not just the tradition of female genital mutilation; it was the very structure of a society based on the subjugation or enslavement of femininity. Today, Dunia can be viewed for free on the Internet in its original version (without subtitles), something that delights me. Young girls often come to me and confess they have secretly watched it dozens of times.

Interview conducted by Nicole Brenez in Paris, 20 December 2015
Text approved by Jocelyne Saab / Translated by Brad Stevens

L’article JOCELYNE SAAB: MULTIPLE METHODS OF CENSORSHIP est apparu en premier sur Each Dawn a Censor Dies.

Jocelyne Saab filming Le Bateau de l’exil, 1982

Born in Beirut in 1948, Jocelyne Saab is a journalist, photographer, writer, filmmaker, producer and visual artist. In 1972, she was hired to write for the writer and artist Etel Adnan’s journal As Safa, and Adnan later wrote the commentary for her film Beyrouth, jamais plus (‘Beirut, Never Again’, 1976). After shooting several reports for Lebanese and French television companies in Egypt, Western Sahara, Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, Syria and Vietnam, Saab produced and directed her first feature-length film, Le Liban dans la tourmente (‘Lebanon in Torment’, 1975). Writing about this film, Adnan claimed: “This is an extraordinary achievement. It catches the Lebanese environment which led to this war in a way no previous document, whether written or filmed, has ever done. Through her political courage, moral integrity, and profound intelligence, Jocelyne instinctively grasped the essence of this conflict. No document about this war matches in importance Jocelyne’s cinematic achievement in the three films she has dedicated to Lebanon. This is not only a rare work of fundamental importance for the history of our country, but also a study whose implications stretch beyond Lebanon, and should be taught on university courses devoted to sociology and contemporary world politics.”** In 1979, Saab helped Algerian filmmaker Farouk Beloufa make his classic Nahla ou la ville qui sombre (‘Nahla or The Dark City’), an allegory in which a singer who is losing her voice represents Lebanon in a state of disintegration. Beloufa’s film is also a collective portrait of a group of photographers and journalists who were active during the dawn of the civil war, and Saab shot a documentary showing it being made.***  She subsequently continued covering her country’s conflicts and wars, and in 1982 made Beyrouth ma ville (‘Beirut, My City’), written by Roger Assaf, which she considers her most important film. Beyrouth ma ville begins with one of the most impressive sequences in cinema history: in the burning and smoldering ruins of her own house bombed by Israeli shelling, we see Saab grabbing a microphone and, with chilling rationality, bearing witness to the 150 years of family history which have just been destroyed. “Risking your life, you took your camera where there were still women, men, children. You could not wait to report on this city, on these people threatened with extermination. Is that not cinema?”** asked Algerian writer Wassyla Tamzali. After working as an assistant director on Volker Schlöndorff’s Die Fälschung (‘Circle of Deceit’, 1981), Saab developed a parallel vein of fictional films which were grounded in reality yet poetic in structure. In 1985, she co-produced and directed her first feature-length fiction film, L’Adolescente, sucre d’amour (aka Une vie suspendue), which starred Juliet Berto and Jacques Weber, then, in 1994, Il était une fois… Beyrouth, histoire d’une star (‘Once Upon a Time…Beirut, the Story of a Star’), a cinematic fable conveying visual memories of a city in ruins. In an unpublished text tracing the genesis of this film, she explained: “I was using cinema as a means of reclaiming my city, hoping it would enable me to look at this city in a way which rejected the violence of that viewpoint imposed by the war. I did not want my city to be seen as an open grave; I wanted to rediscover the loving gaze with which I had always seen it.” In 2005 she made Dunia, a film shot in Cairo dedicated to the subject of female circumcision and pleasure in an Islamic context; it earned her both death threats and censorship. In 2009 she returned to Beirut to make the fiction feature What’s Going On?, and in 2013 founded the Festival International du Film de Résistance Culturelle (‘Cultural Resistance International Film Festival’), which takes place simultaneously in several cities (Beirut, Tripoli, Tyre, Sidon, Zahleh …), and aims to build bridges between supposedly antagonistic communities.

Since 2007, Saab has also dedicated herself to contemporary art. Strange Games and Bridges, her first installation, was spread across 22 screens at the National Museum of Singapore, and made use of her war footage. That year, she also exhibited her photographs at the Dubai Art Fair.

As a war reporter Saab belongs to the same documentary/artistic movement as Elie Kagan, Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and Maria Eisner. Despite its importance, nothing of her photographic work has been published to date. Yet this work reflects five decades in the history of the Third World in general and the Middle East in particular, a history told by Saab in the full breadth and diversity of its dimensions, its conflicts, injuries, disappearances, traumas, rebirths. Going body to body with the violence of history, Jocelyne Saab has frequently suffered, often braving dangers, physical beatings, death threats, and, as will be detailed in the upcoming interview, various forms of censorship in several countries (France, Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon …). One could hardly improve on the statement made by her friend Etel Adnan in 2015: “Because of the films she has made and the life she has chosen to live, she is one of the bravest, most intelligent, and above all freest individuals I know. Her insistence on maintaining her freedom to think and act has cost her dearly. At times, this was a matter of life and death. Few men or women have suffered so greatly in order to remain true to themselves and survive in a way that makes sense in a world as hostile or indifferent as ours. Jocelyne’s work deserves to be recognized for its true, its great value, and I am happy to say that few people deserve such admiration.”**

In 2015, a monograph by Mathilde Rouxel was devoted to her: Jocelyne Saab, la mémoire indomptée (‘Jocelyne Saab, Untamed Memory’, Beirut, Dar an-Nahar).

Nicole Brenez, February 2016.
English translation by Brad Stevens

Footnotes
* This is the slogan of Jean-Luc Godard’s Film socialisme (2010).
** From the Jocelyne Saab dossier compiled by Nicole Brenez and Olivier Hadouchi, La Furia Umana, No. 7, 2015, pp. 205-293.
*** This making of documentary, Reportage sur le tournage de ‘Nahla’ (1979, 16mm, 27 ‘), is available as an extra on the French DVD of Farouk Beloufa’s Nahla released by Les Mutins de Pangée in 2015.

L’article JOCELYNE SAAB: “THE PRICE OF FREEDOM IS HIGH”* est apparu en premier sur Each Dawn a Censor Dies.

Ing K: I’m an art school drop-out, so I am formed by life rather than by formal education, though I did have a good classical education both in Thailand and later in England (middle and high school).

Ing K. Photo : Manit Sriwanichpoom

My biggest influence was undoubtedly my mother, an artist, teacher and serious environmental activist.  She was Thai but was born and raised in England during World War 2 (to this day, we don’t waste food in our family!). She inspired in me a great love of nature, art and music, as well as English poetry (Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Blake especially, but nonsense rhymes too) and world myths and fairy tales, especially Greek mythology, which is probably my first religion. At the same time at school in Thailand I was steeped in Thai epic poetry, which as a child I loved to chant in the traditional way. (Thai education has since changed for the worse; the current syllabus almost totally neglects essay-writing and the teaching of poetry. Thai culture is actually very lyrical; when you take this away, you take away our soul. I consider this one of the roots of our present evil.)

I went to art school instead of university because I wanted to become a painter, but I dropped out after seeing a film on the Cambodian refugee crisis on TV which made me feel guilty and useless, so I came back home to work in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border in 1980. This led to journalism and eventually to film.

Spiritually, my mother’s parents were Zen Buddhists/Taoists; my father’s half-German mother was Catholic, while his father came from a Hindu priestly family from India, though they’re now Thai Buddhists. So it’s a complete mix. I have no specific religion, or rather I take freely from all religions and mythologies. I travel a lot in India, Greece and Nepal, which I consider my spiritual homes.

NB: How and why did you conceive Shakespeare Must Die? How long to translate Macbeth?

IK: Poetry has always been a great part of my life. However, as a writer here I’m known for investigative journalism (the environment). Though I’ve also written on film and poetry a little, I’d never really had the chance to express this core part of myself. I am also a horror movie junkie, so Macbeth, rightly considered by many as the Great Grandfather of Horror, combines my obsessions.

I first encountered the play as a 15 year old at school in England and it has haunted me all my life. At the back of my mind the dream was always there, to translate it into a Thai horror movie. There is much in it that Thai people can relate to: a black magic-obsessed tyrant with a scary wife, an exploration of megalomania, a discussion on the divine right of kings, extra-judicial killings, the fate of a land in darkness.

In 2008 I’d just finished Citizen Juling, a documentary about the unrest in the Muslim-majority South of Thailand. This film, permeated with a terrible sense of loss, consumed me with its grief. I was in the perfect frame of mind to tackle Macbeth, which as Shakespeare Must Die is a totally natural outflow, of blood and tears if you will, from our conversations with the grief-stricken people of the South, Muslims and Buddhists, who have suffered most from Thaksin’s (our Macbeth-like former Prime Minister, now a fugitive in Dubai from a corruption conviction, who was still running Thailand through his little sister Yingluck Shinawatra, our first woman Prime Minister who chaired the Film Board that banned Shakespeare Must Die) rule by greed, fear and violence.

I thought the translation would take years or turn out to be an impossible task. But it gripped me utterly and after locking myself away for four months, not just the straight translation but the whole script was done, which really surprised me. In a way I should not have been so surprised, since I’ve translated many different things, from laws to poetry, and I’ve always found that the better the writing, the easier it is to translate. In translation, one has to submit one’s personality to the writer’s style and soul, so if it’s a stupid style and badly written, the soul rebels against it. Shakespeare packs so many layers of sensations and meanings into a single line, even a single word, so it would seem impossible to render. Yet it is so enjoyable that I didn’t mind the effort of stretching my whole mind in its service. I soon found that there is something deeply universal and instinctive about the Shakespearean sound and imagery.  (There are things you have to change, for instance: Macbeth’s “I’ll not play the Roman fool…” had to become “I’ll not play the Samurai fool…”  There’s just no time to explain Roman culture to a Thai audience at that point, but we’ve heard of Japanese samurais committing hara-kiri.)

NB: How was the production of Shakespeare Must Die possible?

IK: Shakespeare Must Die was funded by the Ministry of Culture’s Creative Thailand Film Fund, which was a project of a previous (Abhisit Vejjajiva/Democrat) government and no longer exists. At least 50 other films received this funding, most of which went to the big studios rather than to independents like us. It was the last film to receive the funding, as the board was concerned about our depiction of the regicide scene. We had to shoot the scene and show them all the footage before they were convinced of our Shakespearean sincerity. All other films only had to submit a synopsis and treatment.

I’m mistrusted because I have no doctrine except John Keats’ “Beauty is Truth”; my creative roots are purely organic story-telling. When people can’t classify you as ‘left’ or ‘right’, ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’, ‘classical’ or ‘postmodern’ etc., they become suspicious; they fear what they don’t understand. I know this is true everywhere, but especially here because Thai people are raised on state propaganda. (To explain this I would have to take you back to World War 2. Imagine if in France, instead of honouring the Resistance, the Nazi collaborators are honoured and the Resistance is reviled. That’s basically what has happened here. My family was very much a part of the Free Thai during the war and so we know the ‘forbidden history’ and don’t believe the fascist propaganda.)

NB: Shakespeare Must Die is remarkable for its courage and aesthetic uniqueness. But were you inspired by other artists eg. Hans Jürgen Syberberg at the beginning and end of the film, because of the impressive work on images in the background of the scene?

IK: I’m deeply ashamed to say I’d never heard of Hans Jürgen Syberberg! I googled him after reading your question and will sit down to watch Hitler as soon as I have time; it looks amazing. Thank you for the recommendation.

I’m a visual person since at heart I’m still the painter that I was trained to be. (I still paint with oil on canvas.) As a filmmaker I have to work with very small budgets, so the best way to increase production value is to rely on what we have—a strong art department as well as artist friends who can lend us their work (often worth more than the whole film, such as the weird rollicking statues under the witches’ tree and the painting behind M and Lady M in her boudoir). I solve budget problems with the structure of the film, by working with what I do have. It would’ve been great to make a realistic Macbeth with a coup d’Etat with real tanks in the streets etc., but obviously this is not possible, so I made use of the Shakespearean ‘play within a play’ device. Whatever I couldn’t afford, I put on a theatre stage, so that stage tricks and cheap swords would be acceptable, in the way that Shakespeare makes an actor stand between two lovers and call him ‘wall’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Such artificiality could in the end serve to contrast with the realistic violence of the lynching in ‘the real world’ at the end. At the same time, since Thailand was never a Western colony and has no Shakespearean culture to speak of (to most Thai people, Shakespeare is just a ‘high-end brand’ like Prada or Chanel), I wanted the Thai audience to experience the theatricality of it, as well as to revel in Shakespeare’s love of leaping from one ‘reality’ to another without warning, at any time, at will. I love the way he bleeds the senses into one another and one dimension into another. We go into and out of people’s heads at will.

Generally, though I love film, I’m more influenced by art, literature and current news footage than film. I have to say that for Shakespeare Must Die, I made the conscious decision to trust Shakespeare absolutely, wherever that might lead, no matter how scary or ‘uncool’ this might sometimes prove to be. Thai folk opera (a wonderful mix of minimalism and maximalism) and TV soaps are other strong influences for the film. I wanted to use some of their grammar to lull the Thai audience (which is very addicted to nightly TV melodramas) with its apparent familiarity while the Shakespearean dialogue mesmerises them on an entirely another level.

You mention the opening of the film—I presume you mean the girl walking through a cemetery to make offerings to a cheap fun fair cut-out of the Hindu Goddess Durga. Before every Thai performance, from Thai folk opera to boxing, there is always a brief ceremony of ‘Guru Worship’. I use the Goddess Durga for our film’s Guru worship because she is the slayer of fear and ignorance; like Kali, she is the teacher of painful lessons. Her face is a hole, like the cut-outs you see for people to pose for photos at carnivals. God is nobody; God is you. We go through the hole into the story, into Macbeth’s mansion, as if the Goddess is the one showing you this morality play. Again, I arrived at the cheap cut-out art department solution because I couldn’t afford to achieve a vision of the Goddess with visual effects. This cut-out could then be used again for the propaganda children scene (the Hecate scene in Macbeth).

NB: Apart from the censorship, how has the film been received in Thailand? Any secret screenings?

IK: We’ve had about 4 private screenings at universities. The response has been wonderful. Before we were banned, my greatest fear was the reaction of local Shakespeareans, but they have been the most supportive. But the best comment came from a political science professor who told me that now he understands why westerners enjoy Shakespeare. It made me feel that I succeeded in what I set out to do. It’s such a pity that we couldn’t release the film right then. It would’ve played during Shutdown Bangkok. The atmosphere of revolution would’ve been the perfect moment to be showing Shakespeare Must Die in cinemas.

Someone who knew the protest organizers told me I should try to show the film at the main protest site at Democracy Monument (which was like a massive camp site interspersed with screens to relay the protest leaders’ speeches to people sitting far from the main stage). That would’ve been  amazing. However, they’d never shown any film at the protest and a horror movie is not really a good choice for the situation (almost nightly drive-by shootings, sniper and RPG attacks, on angry people whose friends had died). In the worst-case scenario, claiming the film makes fun of their hero, a bunch of Thaksin fanatics might’ve chosen that moment to attack people at the protest (something they’d been threatening to do), then the censors could crow triumphantly that they were right to ban the film as a threat to national security. Such a scenario would set back our campaign to change the film law for years.

NB: When did you decide to make Censor Must Die? Can you explain how the shooting your film Censor Must Die was possible? For example, why and how did the various administrative people you are filming accepted to be recorded?

IK: I was only able to shoot Censor Must Die because no one else had had the nerve to shoot the censors before.

I think anyone who lives behind the camera in one way or another soon learn to become both invisible and brazen at the same time. As the censors kept on delaying their verdict and things began to look really bad for Shakespeare Must Die, I started trailing my producer with a camera as a stunt to freak them out and hint that the world was watching and perhaps cared for the outcome, and also to keep a record for legal protection.

But then the chief of the censor office started responding to my camera. We had a humourous flirtation, a real rapport, like some Hollywood director with his golden star. I had my man, an absurdist Greek chorus that forewarned and recommended and said ‘I told you so’ in the sweetest way. In cinematic terms he reminded me of Renfield, Dracula’s human pet. It’s just his awful job to serve the powers of darkness. But he was a sympathetic character and we respected each other as human beings. Whenever he told me to turn the camera off, I always did. In my documentarian life I’ve secretly filmed lots of criminal things, with a clean conscience, but this film is about people, not only some issue like stealing water or pesticide use.

As the horrible process of being banned and banned again (when we lost the appeal to the Film Board) dragged on interminably, I got sucked into the story, which is my own story after all, except I’d been trying to (not) live through it from behind a glass eye. Inevitably situations arose where I had to put down the camera, and then I lost it. In the senate hearing room no one told us not to film, but in that situation I couldn’t film and answer hostile questions at the same time. We recorded audio which we used, including my scream when I lost all hope. You can imagine how hard it was to use that in the film. I knew I would use it if it had been someone else’s scream. The film came first, so I had to use it.

In the final analysis, I only managed to film Censor Must Die because I was shooting it all by myself. No one with a camera crew with soundman in tow would’ve been allowed in. I had the right to be there because I was being judged. And this is something you can do only once. No one else will ever be allowed to make such a film again. I don’t feel guilty about that; it can’t be helped.

The other remarkable thing is even though there’s never been such an explicit firsthand documentary on the banning of a film before, no festival would show Censor Must Die except the Southeast Asian Film Festival and the Cultural Resistance Film Festival of Lebanon in Beirut, where it won Best Documentary. Having blacklisted Shakespeare Must Die as ‘fascist hate speech’ that a ‘democratic’ government headed by a beautiful woman PM was justified in banning as a national security threat, the festivals were obviously not going to touch a film on its banning. I knew that but I sent it to a couple of self-described ‘filmmaker-friendly’ festivals just so I could state the above in total confidence, confirming my conclusions in a ‘scientific’ way. (Please search the following: Thaksin Shinawatra’s PR-lobbyists—Lord Tim Bell of Bell Pottinger, Sam Moon, etc. and Australian National University’s Asian Studies website New Mandala for details before dismissing me as a conspiracy theorist.)

There is such confusion about ‘hate speech’. People are so terrified of political correctness, they’re afraid to think for themselves. This makes it almost too easy for the corporate colonial lobby, especially since so few hands now control everything, certainly in media, including film festivals. When you think about it, certainly if you’d been the victim of such a vicious and thorough smear campaign yourself, you’d see that falsehood is the only hate speech, really. Lies kill. Injustice embitters people. They feel so helpless. I call it being Palestinised. Nothing left to do but to explode. World commentators wring their hands crying “Where are the moderates?!” But the machinery is broken that would convey their voices and versions of the story to the world. The whole structure is infested and perverted by masters of the universe who employ ‘CSR’, green propaganda and ‘groovy’ people who have learned to speak your emoji. And it is total eclipse.

NB: Is it possible to see your film Censor Must Die in Thailand?

IK: Censor Must Die isn’t banned, in fact it’s the first film in Thai cinema history to be “exempt from the censorship process” since it was “made from events that really happened.” The censors are citing a law that exempts news footage from censorship. But at the same time, they have threatened to sue any cinema that shows the film, saying that they never gave us permission to film in their office. This is ridiculous as I never shot surreptitiously and they interact with the camera quite openly, but Thai cinemas are owned by the big studios and distributors, who must submit their films to the censors all the time. So Censor Must Die is in effect banned too.

NB: How do you feel about the future of Thailand? How would you formulate a response of film to an oppressive political situation?

IK: The future of Thailand? At the time of the occupy Bangkok protests, I felt optimistic. Long-suppressed energy was being at long last released. It’s always cleansing for the truth to reveal itself.

Thaksin is our instrument of liberation. Certainly he has freed us from any lingering awe or respect we might have harboured for Western media and institutions. This is surely a good thing and long-overdue. Thaksin is our nemesis, a potent and bitter medicine; it’s as if he’s been specifically designed to plague us in exactly the right way for us to react to cleanse and examine ourselves. He personifies the dark side of our collective psyche, in the same way that Hitler did for the German people.  A gift from the Goddess of Painful Lessons. Before him, we “happy-go-lucky Thais” never really suffered, not in the way that other countries have suffered, so we were never forced to really come to grips with our dark side.

This is of course the gut feeling of a horror filmmaker, not the analysis of an academic. It’s a horror movie in full bright sunshine. The horror we are experiencing through Thaksin is in the deepest sense the horror of our own moral bankruptcy. Such a man would not be possible otherwise. It didn’t look like Bosnia or Sudan, but everything was wrong. On the material level, the corruption was brazen and on an unimaginable scale; in public life, there was a total lack of conscience; things looked normal but people disappeared. (Search: human rights lawyer Somchai Neelapaichitr and businessman Ekayuth Anchanbutr)

The Shutdown Bangkok protest was a zero-sum game, because what I call The Beast, the great mass of the people, has finally had enough and rejects all pretense of compromise. No more lies, full stop. We will never believe a word you say and we want you gone, full stop. We have to win because if we lose, we will become a failed state, that’s all. That’s why I’m optimistic; when there’s no alternative, all the energy flows in one direction.

I recorded much of what was happening—wonderful, mesmerising images with a cast of thousands, for free. At first I was just collecting stock footage, but I soon realised that another film was organically growing from these images—and sounds, such incredible sounds: the roar of a great crowd, the voice of the Beast. Before this happened, I’d been struggling to write a script that would express that voice, but nothing I could dream up was extreme enough. When these protests erupted at Hallowe’en 2013, I realised the movie I was trying to write was actually right here in front of me; all I had to do was go out there and shoot it.  I was hoping to construct something from the images in a raw, impressionistic way.

I think there is no way to consciously ‘formulate’ a cinematic response to an oppressive political situation. It has to happen naturally, instinctively. A consciously designed cinematic response is likely to be unfree of propaganda; it may even be insincere and opportunistic, just making a certain type of film to fulfill a certain expectation. I think you have to have the faith to let it form itself unconsciously, un-self-consciously, as it will, not as you consciously will.

The protesters’ story sucked me in and I ended up going out to film nearly every day for seven months.

One week after the 22 May 2014 coup d’etat sent protesters home from their entrenched camps in the streets, I took the footage into my cave and have been cutting it since. In terms of Thai politics since the coup, most people are actually quite relaxed. They’re exhausted from all the drama. The little people have done enough dying; now it’s the turn of the elephants to fight and die.  People have consented to the military takeover for now because we know we’re on the verge of civil war. Surely it’s better to do our own peacekeeping than to have a UN peacekeeping force. We are protective of our independence and don’t like outside powers to interfere.

We may be standing on the edge of a cliff, as is the rest of the world, but I stand by my optimistic far outlook. After what I’ve seen and shot, there is no way most of these people who have sacrificed so much would stay home if promises of reform are not kept. Millions of ordinary people who had never protested before have become empowered: these camps were like training camps in activism and democracy in action, not words. Even people who used to look down on my environmental ‘agitation’ sat on hot cement roads in the sun day after day. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Ordinary people from all over the country marched and camped side by side with seasoned anti-Free Trade Agreement activists, farmers, environmentalists, disciplined practitioners of non-violence; artists, trades unions (railway, airline, energy), royalists and communists all hung out together and realised that they were people like themselves. They learned to recycle their rubbish and to sit down stoically when violence threatens; how to deal with tear gas, build bunkers, raise funds and organize communal kitchens. I was so impressed. They made friends across region, culture, class, sexual identity (2 protest leaders were professors in drag), age, religion, profession. They went to funeral after funeral together. There is no way things can ever go back to business as usual. The real change is not flashy but profound and wide-reaching. They came from everywhere and so they went back everywhere.

Actually I think the world could learn a lot from them, if it weren’t so busy dismissing them as an ‘anti-democratic evil elite royalist movement’, etc., obediently (opportunistically) following the simplistic Thaksinite script.

NB: Can you tell us a little about your actual new work?

IK: It’s called Bangkok Joyride, a series of cinéma verité documentaries on the epic Shutdown Bangkok protests. No narration, no explanation, just the real footage strung together and woven with TV news and government propaganda (shot on my phone through the TV screen, so very grainy). It races along like a suicidal express train full of screaming, joyous people ready to die and to party on the streets until then.

The images are just extraordinary. They’ve been surprising even me when I go back to trim. After a while I learned to stand still in the best possible vantage point and let the story come to the waiting camera in the crowd. Sometimes I had to hold the spot for hours (5 hours the longest) before the people came flowing in, a human tide of incredible variety and flapping flags in a stiff breeze in bright sunshine on a bridge across the river, for instance.

I spent much of my time in the encampment of the ‘Dharma Army’ people. They’re always put on the frontline because of their patience and ahimsa (non-violence) discipline. When there’s trouble, they never panic; they just sit down and pray for the spiritual liberation of the riot police. They’re vegans and they hate your cigarettes and alcohol, but they’re practical, funny and brave (a sign at the camp: “Sleeping area: No Smoking please; we’re saving our lungs for tear gas”). A lot more people would’ve died but for them.

I’m fully aware that there’s no place in this space and time for Bangkok Joyride 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, but it’s a historical record that someone somewhere must set down. What a scandal that literally millions of people came out onto the streets to shut down a city for seven months in deep conviction in ahimsa, and yet there is no film about them—in fact they barely appeared on international news channels. When they did appear on the BBC and CNN, they’re portrayed by apparently morally outraged white men with trembling voices as demonic forces against Thaksin the Champion of Democracy.

It’s a waste of energy to fight such a monolith. I minimize my contact with toxin and focus on my real vocation, which is to be the truthful witness. Everything else is irrelevant. No dogma, no icing, just the naked thing itself. Our religion of cinema provides a healthier outlet for our righteous rage. We don’t drone-blitz or blow up people. We serve truth and beauty best by holding up a mirror.

Chapter 1 is almost done; I couldn’t trim it until I’d done the first cut of the rest. Last week a pessimist told me the military government could try to ban BK Joyride as a potential threat to unity, and that if Thaksin’s party returns to power, it would be banned anyway. However, unless they physically restrain us, I’m going to cite the censors’ historic ruling to exempt Censor Must Die from the censorship process, “because it is made from events that actually happened” (as with news footage) and not submit to the censors. Finding an audience shouldn’t be difficult; even if only 10% of the people who took part in the protests came to see themselves, we’d be fine.

NB: Would you have an advice to formulate for filmmakers in repressive or even dictatorial situations from all over the world?

IK: If you want to kill yourself, don’t. You might as well make courageous films that get you or your future killed instead. I’m not really joking. Perhaps that’s what I’m doing.

Oppression can embitter us, or we could use it to sharpen our conviction, forcing us to chrystalise our reason for making films. We should make the films that we really want to make as inspired by our situation. It’s easy to tell the expected banana republic story that confirms the cultural masters’ prejudices and worldview of us as being not quite as human as they are, which is what you must do to have a career. But I hope you’ll tell your own story, however hard that might be, so that the film will have been grown organically in your own psychic soil.

There is so much of what I call designer protest art and film, dictated by or targeting international curators who set the agenda while the artists dance to the synthetic drumbeat. It’s not just unsatisfying but adds to the potential for violence. It’s not that I don’t know what appeals to the gods or what you think is cool, but it is my mission, of peace, to undermine such repressive and corrosive, dehumanising colonial preconceptions.

I think if you’re compelled to tell stories on film then you will do it anyway, regardless. The only way to stay healthy, fulfilled and productive is to keep on going. Make a film with your phone if you must. The only way I’ve been able to take on such a mammoth project as BK Joyride is because working on it saves me from despair. Do whatever you’re allowed to do by circumstances. For instance, my natural canvas is actually quite vast because of my fascination with colonialism and the dark side of our history, but given my circumstances, I have to find a minimalist and nimble approach around both the fascist and the budget problems. Not many people get the chance to make what they dream, but you shouldn’t give up on the story. You could end up with something far more inventive.

The important thing is to keep on pushing the envelope. Moralistic freaks and megalomaniacs are always pushing forward their line; masters of the universe are always subverting and closing one more door. If we don’t push back in our own work in our own small way, we’d soon have no place to stand at all. Even if you might not be able to release the film before you die, at least you will have made it, no regrets.

If you’re up to it, you could fight the oppression directly by trying to amend bad laws. The main contemporary art museum, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) has been hosting meetings to reform cultural laws. I’ve gone to every single one, to make sure they’ll include the end of the banning of films in the new law bring written in parliament (after the coup, they have these sideline meetings for every profession/ town/ special interest, which then submits their dream version to legislators). We learned how all cinemas in Thailand are owned by just 2-3 companies, two of which are related and all of which also own the major studios; how independent producers are charged a substantial ‘theatre deterioration fee’, a new invention voted into being, oddly, by the film producers’ federation (including the directors’ guild), which is chaired by the representative of a national chain of multiplexes. In other words, the theatre owner heads the filmmakers’ union. We can expect no organized industry muscle to fight for our rights, and filmmakers who do are blackballed, so almost no one comes.

It’s unlikely that a military government would end the banning of films, but there was unbelievably good news when one of the judges in administrative court said Insects in the Backyard, the other banned film that’s suing the censors, was not obscene and should not have been banned and the censors had infringed on the filmmaker’s human rights. But there was no Christmas present to Thai cinema from the Admin Court after all. The verdict on Dec 25, 2015 was to keep the ban on Insects in the Backyard. The director has had enough and is not appealing the verdict, so we’re the only ones left fighting now. They had to wait five years for that. We’ve waited three now for our day in court for Shakespeare Must Die.

The same museum also hosted a Free Ganja law reform meeting to decriminalise marijuana. In total contrast to our meetings, this was so packed the room overflowed. There was reason, open-mindedness and warmth, from the doctors speaking about cancer and glaucoma treatment to the observer from the military government (I’ve never seen one at our lonely meetings, obviously not important enough). Cultural law reform meetings have been nasty, hate-filled and haunted with futility, sparsely attended by entrenched enemies.

Judging from this, I might soon be able to smoke weed in front of a policeman, but I still won’t be able to make a Thai stoner movie. It’s possible that the world-famous Thai ganja will be free before Thai cinema is free.

Nicole Brenez.
Thank you Jocelyne Saab and Philip Cheah.

L’article Interview with Ing K est apparu en premier sur Each Dawn a Censor Dies.

Shakespeare Must Die, Ing K, 2012, video, color, Thaïland, 172 min (vo st eng)

Abandoning studies in fine arts to rescue refugees at the Cambodian border because she felt it more important to help her neighbours: the approach of journalist and filmmaker Ing K(anjanavanit) can be summarized in such a step. This decision has the beautiful effect of structuring artistic work from real-life violence, as evidenced by the masterful diptych Shakespeare Must Die (fiction, 2012) and Censor Must Die (documentary, 2013). Ing K had previously created a work of fiction, My Teacher Eats Biscuits (1998, 16mm), that was censored by the ‘democratic’ government, as well as a series of documentaries: Thailand for Sale (1991), Green Menace: The Untold Story of Golf (1993), Casino Cambodia (1994) and Citizen Juling (2008), four films dedicated respectively to the economic, ecological, social and religious problems of her country, Thailand (though she prefers to use what she called its pre-fascist name, Siam).

Ing K first appeared on the international scene in 1999 as leader of a group of environmentalists protesting against the shooting of Twentieth-Century Fox’s production The Beach (Danny Boyle, 2000). The protestors wished firstly to denounce the payment of a considerable sum to the Thai Forest Department for permission to circumvent a law protecting the island of Phi Phi Le, secondly to draw attention to the damage inflicted on this protected natural park’s ecosystem. Determined to embrace every cliché, Fox, as it provides actors with prosthesis and hairpieces, insisted on featuring a hundred palm trees by digging in ancient sanddunes so the island might better play its assigned role as a (so-called) tropical paradise. “These died in a few days and the damaged sanddunes washed away over the coral reefs, turning the most exquisite lagoon into a desert.” When The Beach was released the following year, Ing K and her organization called for a boycott, and staged a mock sacrifice in front of a theater, with the victim wearing a Leonardo DiCaprio mask. “The Beach nightmare was the thing that opened my eyes to what the world was becoming, the way PR works to manipulate the media. As a journalist and documentarian I had helped to win some battles to save the national park law from becoming weakened by encroaching resort developers, but when we lost The Beach battle, we lost the national park war.”

Just as Eisenstein held up the mirror of bloody truth to Stalin with Ivan the Terrible (1945-1958), as a prism for Bangkok’s corrupt and blood-soaked dictatorship, Shakespeare Must Die brilliantly uses Macbeth, translated word for word into Thai by Ing K herself. Although Shakespeare Must Die resembles only itself, its visual inventiveness suggests a marriage between Hans Jürgen Syberberg and Derek Jarman. The immediate banning of the film in Thailand, under the pretext of “a threat to national unity,” caused the fearless Ing K to create a work inspired by her struggles with the authorities to get Shakespeare Must Die released. Thus was born Censors Must Die, a Kafkaesque fresco which shatteringly describes the relationship between a repressive government and its opponents, providing not only a detailed account of the rational and irrational tactics of both sides, but also a great love story for its protagonist, the producer Manit Sriwanichpoom (himself an important contemporary photographer).

Censor Must Die, Ing K, 2013, video, color, Thaïland, 150 min (vo st ang)

Ing K sums up Censor Must Die in this way: “Wherever [Manit] went, amidst political upheaval in a land of fear, a camera followed him, into secret places long hidden from the sun, where witnesses are not welcome. The resulting cinema verite is the living story of a struggle for justice and human dignity, for the fundamental right to freedom of expression, which Thai filmmakers do not have. This is cinematic democracy in action, in all its obscene and heartbreaking details; a dark record of events farcical enough to be enjoyed as a comedy.”

Though still refusing to permit the release of Shakespeare Must Die, on 6 August 2013, the Film & Video Censorship Committee strangely decides Censor Must Die “need not be submitted to the censor,” since the events it describes actually happened: “The film Censor Must Die has content that shows events that happened to Mr Manit Sriwanichpoom, who claims to have been unjustly treated by a state agency; therefore, it is a film that is not required to pass through the censorship process.” Thus a mirror held up before the censorship makes the censor retreat into absurdity, allowing Ing K’s guerilla images to enjoy a surprising victory.

Today, this tireless filmmaker is developing a series of documentaries on the revolutionary events of 2013 in Bangkok. The overall name of this blog – which combines Censor Must Die‘s title with that of William Keighley’s 1939 film Each Dawn I Die (another tale of a journalist fighting corruption) – is a modest tribute to the brio, courage, altruism, erudition and puckish irony which characterize Ing K’s exemplary work.

Nicole Brenez, January 2016
Translation of the French by Brad Stevens

L’article ING K: “A THREAT TO NATIONAL UNITY” est apparu en premier sur Each Dawn a Censor Dies.

Bani Khoshnoudi. Photo : Felipe Perez-Burchard

“Each face could be that of a political prisoner or a martyr,” says Bani Khoshnoudi in her masterpiece The Silent Majority Speaks, which was filmed in Tehran during the Green Movement in 2009, and only distributed clandestinely under the pseudonym “The Silent Collective” until 2013.  To be witness to a popular uprising against the dictatorship, while taking care not to endanger those whom she filmed; to go over a century of political upheaval that has been more or less insurrectionary and always repressed to the point of bloodshed; to reflect on the lethal, toxic yet sometimes, on the contrary, emancipatory function of images: the sum of these tasks, taken up in The Silent Majority Speaks, clearly show the self-demanding nature that moves the visual artist, filmmaker and producer Bani Khoshnoudi. Fleeing all dogmatism, she develops what one could call an “activism of questioning”, which she has practiced in the context of popular protests in Iran, the anti-migrant political situation in France, or even Zapotec culture in Mexico. In a book on self-liberation whose title, Les sauvages dans la cité (‘Savages in the City’), recalls the name that Bani Khoshnoudi has chosen for her production house, thus placing it under the aegis of Claude Levi-Strauss’ “la Pensée Sauvage” or the “The Savage Mind”, the historian René Parize made a distinction between “submissive knowledge” and “the knowledge of revolt »*.

Faced with political-religious censorship as much as certain strategies of self-censorship, Bani Khoshnoudi’s work develops not only an ingenious expertise of “the knowledge and know-how of revolt”, but also and especially, something essential: an unbreakable conviction, as one will discover in the following interview.

Nicole Brenez: Could you describe your artistic process: your background, training and achievements?

Bani Khoshnoudi: I began my artistic explorations while very young through drawing and painting, but during my adolescence I quickly became fascinated by photography. My high school had a laboratory, and I signed up for a journalism course to get access to it. I would steal rolls of film so I could do my own photography, which I developed and printed in secret in the darkroom at school. I was so taken when I discovered the effect that light had on film, and was immediately conquered by the paradox of the possibilities and limitations of the camera and celluloid.  Since I couldn’t stop taking photographs, my father built me a darkroom at home. Yet when it was time to go to university,  my family did not agree to me studying art, so I started out by studying architecture, which my father saw as a compromise between art and science;  something that would help me find a job later. Even though I was interested in the aesthetics and historical aspects of architecture, I could tell that this field would be too rigid for me, and my desire to explore photography and the other arts really was irrepressible.  After a few months, I gave up my architectural studies and transferred to the Photography department, which was located in the same building as the film school. It was there that I discovered my love of cinema and began making films. At first it was through film history or film theory (cinema studies), but philosophy and ethnography also played a big role. Then, little by little I started collaborating on projects and shooting short films. This was in the 1990s, when the cinema community in Austin, Texas was emerging. Richard Linklater and other cinephiles had founded the Austin Film Society, which was where I discovered Tarkovsky, Oshima, Satyajit Ray and others. I assisted local directors who were shooting films and worked on school projects, which allowed me to live an amazing period of experimentation and collaboration. At the same time, I was continuing my studies in Cinema and Italian, and since this was a public university, I was able to take additional courses in sociology, philosophy, literature and history.  Thanks to several remarkable teachers, I discovered Godard, Chris Marker, Jean Rouch, Frederick Wiseman and Dennis O’Rourke, among others, but also writers and thinkers such as James Baldwin, Pirandello, Roland Barthes, Hannah Arendt, Cesare Pavese, Donna Haraway, Deleuze… Anyway, my student years marked me deeply. When I finally started making my own films, at first I had no idea what I was doing, or even what kind of films I wanted to create, but once I actually started working, I never doubted my decision or had the slightest desire to do anything else, even if this field is sometimes oppressively precarious.

After completing my studies, I went to live in Europe; first in Rome, then Paris. That same year, I also took my first trip back to Iran after being away for 22 years. I was making several experimental short films that allowed me to explore what I had discovered there, but also here, without feeling obliged to make any strong statement. At the same time I was doing diverse jobs in Paris,  and was very active, independently, but also with some groups, in denouncing the situation of immigrants in France and Europe. I visited the Sangatte refugee camp near Calais, and met hundreds of people, many from Iran and Afghanistan, as well as Kurds from Iraq. In 2002, when Sarkozy (then Minister of the Interior) closed the camp, we formed a collective to try and shed some light on the profound injustice and the repressive mechanisms that were used against these people who had crossed half the world. The situation on the streets of Paris was becoming unbearable; hundreds of people (men, women and children) were sleeping outside, even during the winter. In 2004 I made Transit, a short film that I wrote inspired by the stories of migrants I met at Sangatte. I made the film in collaboration with exiles who were in Paris at the time and who essentially played themselves. This was, one might say, my first ‘real’ film, and I was surprised by the response when it came out. I won awards and the film was widely seen. I then made A People in the Shadows, a documentary about the city where I was born, Tehran, while inspired by the methods of Jean Rouch and Frederick Wiseman. The film is a sort of trance- like wandering in the city, exploring both the city itself but also my subjective view of it, as well as the power of the camera, as I filmed it completely hand- held. After completing this film, I was invited to the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, where I had the opportunity to continue with my theoretical research, and was able to make more experimental work in the form of video and sound installations. I was thinking a lot about the archive and first-person testimonies as material to work with. Two years later, I made Ziba, my first fiction feature, which I filmed in Iran, and which somehow marked the end of an ‘Iranian period’ in my work. I currently live in Mexico City, where I have several ongoing projects.  And, of course, between 2009 and 2010 I made a documentary called The Silent Majority Speaks, which I have kept secret until recently.

NB: How were you able to make The Silent Majority Speaks ?

BK: Initially, I had no idea that I was going to make a film. I was in Tehran during the 2009 election, and naturally I had started filming in the streets. What I saw and experienced during the weeks leading up to the election was unprecedented; everyone was living in such a state of euphoria that I felt as if I was in a trance while walking around holding my camera. Actually, during the election campaign it was as if we were living in another country. It was a moment of great freedom and tolerance, a time when we could say or do almost anything, even if we still maintained our discretion (and, for women, our headscarves, of course). I sometimes stayed outside for twelve hours straight, walking, talking and filming. At night, I would go out with friends to see the “demonstrations” and spontaneous gatherings. All of this was before the vote took place.  The day after the vote, when it became obvious there had been a tremendous fraud, we returned to the streets, but this time in anger.  I continued filming until I became afraid for my life – that was the day when they killed Neda Agha-Soltan [editor’s note: June 20, 2009] – and then I left Tehran.

I took my images with me, but since I was so devastated by what I had been through and what was still going on in Iran, it took me some time before I felt capable of returning to these images and constructing the film. I initially wanted to get rid of the material and just give it to somebody else to use, because it was too much for me and I didn’t know how to make a film without risking never being able to return to Iran again. But after talking with two or three possible candidates, I soon realized that I had a responsibility to everyone who allowed me to film them and spoke openly and fearlessly in front of the camera. Then I became fascinated by what was happening on the Internet; the videos people posted on YouTube, etc. I saw it as a signal for me that it was necessary to talk about this new way of protesting, while documenting the oppression and violence of the state.  Unknowingly, Iranians were creating a people’s archive that would serve us in both the present and the future. The Iranian protests actually set a precedent so far as the use of social networks and the Internet were concerned, since we’ve subsequently seen them being used during revolts in many other countries, notably Tunisia and Egypt. I knew that there was something to say about all this, and so I began developing the idea for what would become The Silent Majority Speaks. I only started really working with the material once I received financial and moral support from the Jan Vrijman Fund of the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam – IDFA, (translator’s note – now known as the IDFA Bertha Fund).  They really wanted to help bring this film into existence and assured me that my identity would be protected. The film also wouldn’t have been possible without the participation of some very dear and courageous people who contributed to the post-production, and especially the anonymous individuals who filmed on the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities, and posted their images on the Internet. This film is dedicated to them for both their courage and the indispensable contribution they have made to our collective memory.

NB: Did you immediately want to create a grand political fresco, or was your initial impulse simply to document the immediate history?

BK: At first I thought I would do a pretty classical film dealing with events before and after the 2009 election, that would convey the general feeling of the people in the streets and the events that were happening. My intentions for the film actually developed in several stages. Initially, I wanted to document what was happening in the streets during the campaign, focusing on this surprising and never before seen freedom of speech that we were experiencing in Iran then. It showed what we would be capable of if we didn’t have the repressive machine hovering over us.  Then, just after the fraud or ‘coup d’état’ (as we were calling it) took place, I knew that I had to document the immediate history as it was unfolding and the revolt that was taking shape, without knowing where all this might be heading (so far as the movement was concerned as well as for my images). After leaving Iran, I began to accumulate images into a sort of personal archive, and as I was living with the images that I had filmed, I started developing more profound ideas and thinking in increasingly broader ways about the events and the historical moment.  During this period, I was rereading familiar texts and was researching further into Iranian history, politics and sociology. I read dozens of books and texts, sometimes on the history of Iran or testimonies of political prisoners (from the past or even the present). I then searched for images and sounds from the past and the present that seemed to reflect our modern history. These were photos, archival film of demonstrations and other images of political events, propaganda films,  television images, audio and visual clips from the war in Iraq, images from trials from the Shah’s time, as well as other trials filmed in 2009, and of course scenes of violence as people kept documenting them in the current revolt. For a few months this become a sort of sickness for me, since the information and images kept piling up, and I never stopped filling my hard drives with them. It was one thing after another, and I almost went crazy. At one point I just said’STOP’, and began thinking about the editing, about how to put all this material into some kind of order. That was when I knew I wanted to make a bigger and more extended film dealing with the question of protest and revolution in Iran, but also about the importance and impact of images from the past and the present on our behavior, as well as the dynamic of the archive, of memory and of collective will.

NB: Did you have certain stylistic references in terms of visual-political analysis, such as The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, or Chris Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat (1977), or Armand Mattelart’s The Spiral (1976)?

BK: Of course. I discovered Solanas and Marker, but also Patricio Guzmán’s The Battle of Chile (1975-1979) and other similar films of the same era when I was at university. A Grin Without a Cat has always been a monumental film for me, and I have watched it several times.  Each time I watch it again, I find new ideas in it, which is in a way, what I love about Chris Marker.  This film influenced me because, as a filmmaker, Chris Marker was not afraid to take some distance from his subjects in order to make us question the politics and ideologies behind the various movements and political parties, and thus to discover the meaning of human participation in it all.  His films and his intervention in his images are of a superior intelligence, and a great source of inspiration.  I also liked many Cuban films from the 1960s, but sometimes I would be put off by the propaganda and tend to prefer when films ask questions, even if these questions remain unanswered, instead of conveying established or absolute ideas. Marker’s films (as well as those of Godard from his Dziga Vertov Group period) inspired me to ask questions and to open my mind, which I believe should be the purpose of this kind of cinema.

NB: The Silent Majority Speaks is a particularly rich and eloquent film on the diverse and sometimes contradictory role that images play in our collective history. How did you construct and organize this aspect of your work?

BK: I had created my own archive with all kinds of images, sounds and texts,  as well as all the material that I was finding on the Internet on this subject. Using my own material as a starting point, I was then going after other images.  I love coincidence and the role that other people’s participation can play in the process of artistic creation, so I was very open to chance and what I was coming across during those months of work.  After assembling a rough cut that ran approximately three hours, I contacted an editor, who unfortunately was not available to work with me, but she looked at the material and asked me questions that then sparked ideas in me about how to go about finding a structure. I covered a wall in my studio with paper and began attaching notes to it with different ideas, phrases, thoughts, but also photos from my archive.  I established a kind of ‘timeline’ out of this material, which was physically posted up on my wall, and then I started making connections and associations between the various elements. While editing, I took images from my ‘archive’ and followed the immediate associations that came up, and then the images themselves instigated others, and little by little, the central ideas of the film took form. The repetitions that I saw in the material imposed themselves on me, and so I based the voice-over that I wrote on this as well.  I would say that the history of these images, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, was already there; I just had to do this excavation and establish the connections that lie behind it all.

NB: How was the film distributed? Why is it now possible to reveal your name, which was originally concealed behind the initial pseudonym that you used, ‘The Silent Collective’?

BK: The film has received very little distribution, probably because there was no “director” to present it in the beginning.  For reasons related to my need to travel freely to Iran and to make other films there, I kept this secret for a long time. IDFA, the festival that gave me support to make the film, screened it in their festival, but since they don’t really have a distribution branch, they couldn’t do much more for it. Then, thanks to an Iranian friend who lives in Germany, the film was screened in galleries in exhibitions and events that dealt with the revolts in Arab countries (the Arab Spring), as well as those related to his own work on collective memory. He screened the film a few times, and some people from Egypt saw it there and then showed it in Cairo, where I know it had a strong resonance.   And that was it, up until I revealed my identity, mainly thanks to your support, Nicole. After that, the film was shown in a few festivals, starting with ART OF THE REAL, which is curated by Dennis Lim and Rachael Rakes at the Lincoln Center in New York, and then in Lussas.  Finally, it was Jocelyne Saab who programmed it for her festival in Lebanon, but it was censured and banned from being shown by the Lebanese authorities, so that never took place. Now, I would like the film to be able to be seen more. Even if I will never have the certainty that it’s safe for me, I’m ready now to take the risk. There will always be this uncertainty for me, but I feel that the film should be seen.  In any case, the film is also the result of the collective archives that Iranians were unknowingly compiling, so the material can’t be seen as work of an individual, even if I was the person who made the film.

NB: The Silent Majority Speaks shares certain images with Where Is This place? This is Iran, My Land and Yours (2009). What is the relationship between these two films?

BK: You mean the images with which I begin the film? The shots that I took from a video posted on YouTube, with the girl in Tehran talking over nighttime images? In fact, just after the revolt began, when night would fall over the city, we would all go up to the rooftops and yell out “Death to the Dictator” (it seems people were doing the same thing in other cities too). This was our way of continuing the protest at night and to communicate with each other across the city’s rooftops, in order to remind ourselves that we were not alone. Living in Iran can sometimes be intensely alienating, because it’s not easy to live openly or freely in the public sphere, which causes everyone to stick to their own circle within the safety of their own homes. As in any revolt anywhere in the world, when night falls the risk of arrests and disappearances increases.  That’s why we would stop and go home every night, but then at nine o’clock we would go up to the rooftops in order to continue protesting, by shouting into the darkness. I also filmed these nightly sessions, but one morning (I think it was just after the first night), I saw this girl’s video that was circulating on social networks. Like many others, I was extremely touched, and I felt that she conveyed a clear idea of our resistance within the alienation of Iran.  For me, it was a poetic way of communicating the anti-authoritarian discourse that was growing in the streets. This girl, with her trembling voice yet strong presence, expressed everything we felt: a certain despair and a sense of being imprisoned or trapped, even though we were in the beginnings of a huge revolt, the most significant to have taken place in Iran since the Revolution of 1979.

NB: How does The Silent Majority Speaks, 2010, relate to your installations Paradox Of Time: Studies in Memory (Parts 1 – 3), 2012?

BK: Since I needed to continue my research into issues of repetition – repetitions of history, of revolt, trauma, images, and human acts – after having finished the film, I started making a series of studies on images, their duration, and how they impact memory and affect. While playing with durations and juxtapositions, I discovered that something psychological and emotional happens when we watch archival images that refer to key moments of history. These studies, that I made with archival footage, show our profound attachment to and dependency in terms of the past and collective memory. Even if we were not present during certain events or do not remember them well, our minds retain these images of revolts, victories, violence, joy, and pain. I would like to explore and better understand the power of images to provoke and stimulate. Images are ultra-powerful; we experienced that during the revolt in 2009. The images of violence and death documented by citizens and posted on the Internet for everyone to see, were a way of calling out to our collective memory and will, as a means to call for action. While I am wary of the power of images, especially archival images, I still found it important that people continued documenting the events. This is a concern I have, but for which I have reached no conclusions. Nonetheless, inspires me to continue carrying out these studies in the form of installations.

NB: As a result (provisional, of course) of these intense experiences and reflections on the representation of collective history, what has become of your conception of the power of film and images in general?

BK: I think cinema and images are still, and always will be, ultra-powerful. In fact, I would say that they have taken on a more central and important place in our lives than before, even if the way we relate to them now has more to do with consumption than with selection. I think Walter Benjamin was definitively right about that, even if sometimes it is not what I am the most worried about. For me, the real problem or crisis has more to do with our inability to reflect and analyze, sometimes to reject or be critical when watching films and the flow of images. We no longer cultivate the way we look and perceive, but easily accept trends, the influences and dynamics of the market and its derivatives (the film industry, its festivals and even some critics are involved in this). Laziness, conformism and the acceptance of capitalist and liberal norms and values on the part of producers and viewers of films, have contributed to a certain banalization of our powerlessness. I say powerlessness because we often do not require ourselves to understand what we are saying or seeing in films. We like things that confirm our preconceptions; we give an advantage to films that do not put us into question and that reiterate a certain Eurocentric taste and language. It is to the point where we can no longer complain about being victims of American hegemony, since we reproduce this hegemony in our own contexts.

NB: What other contemporary initiatives relating to film activism seem the most significant to you?

BK: Unfortunately I have not see many of these films, so I cannot give you a satisfactory answer. I haven’t seen many of the films made about the revolts in the Arab countries (Egypt, Tunisia). The Mosireen group did interesting work in Egypt, although that is more seen within the context of contemporary art than in cinemas. Often times it seems that the films being produced by today’s movements try to push their discourse without nuance or complexity. There is no room for reflection, which is what interests me the most in the end. I’m thinking of certain films linked with the anti-globalist movement (if it still exists), Occupy movements, etc. A number of filmmakers have become interested in political topics, but sometimes it seems more like opportunism or a way to make money from something that should not be profitable. It has almost become a genre in itself.  On the other hand, I sometimes see short pieces or testimonies filmed by people who are involved in struggles in places that are quite forgotten and poorly documented. I’m thinking of videos made by independent resistance groups, like the Community Police for example, in regions such as Guerrero or Michoacán in Mexico. These documents seem very important to me because they not only have been made with a purpose for the present moment, to provide information to the world that continues to be blind to their struggles; but also in an attempt to create an archive of testimonials that will be needed later. But in general, I prefer films that interrogate the politics of the image or aesthetic practices, rather than those that deal with politics period.

NB: For close to a decade, the art world has been reflecting on the artistic treatment of archival documents, what Okwui Enwezor called “Archive Fever” in 2008. In this context, does the work of any specific artists or curators particularly interest you?

BK: I like Martha Rosler’s work with photomontages, and am fascinated by the work of Alfredo Jaar as well. These artists are both working in highly politicized ways on our gaze and our desire, in addition to the subjects they deal with. W.G. Sebald’s books, which for me belong to the world of literature, but also closely relate to the world of art and (fictitious?) archives, are very interesting to me. The way in which Sebald speaks of origins, History, our stories and our memory, touches me deeply.  As far as cinema is concerned, there is Andrei Ujică and his tireless work on Romania; not only the film he co- directed with Harun Farocki – Vidèogrammes d’une rèvolution (1992), which is a masterpiece – but also the last one he made using Ceausescu’s personal archive [editor’s note: The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, 2010]. I also like the playful but still highly politicized work of Craig Baldwin, who belongs to a tradition close to that of René Viénet, because I find that these films allow us to reflect on how images are manufactured and manipulated, as well as our naive faith in what they tell us.

NB: What are your current projects?

BK: I’m preparing several projects at the moment, mostly in Mexico, where I have lived for the last 6 years. I am currently finishing the editing of a film that was commissioned by the Danish festival CPH:DOX. It is an experimental fiction, with documentary elements, but mostly with references to cinema and using an absurdist tone, influenced by Theatre of the Absurd, which I love. I made it in collaboration with some young people and some friends from Teotítlan, a small village in Oaxaca, where we filmed during Carnival.

I am also preparing to film in 2016, my second fiction feature, Fireflies, which tells the story of a young, Iranian homosexual in exile, in a port city in Mexico, Veracruz. I wrote the story after having read a true story of an Iraqi man who ended up in Mexico after having hidden on a cargo ship. It immediately made me think about the new wave of immigration and exile of young Iranians in the last few years.

I am also developing another fiction film, a feature that I will shoot in Paris, but that is still in the scriptwriting phase.  It also deals with questions of exile, memory and the history of Iran, while using some narratives forms from the thriller genre. And there are also various documentary projects that are with me for a while  now,  and that are taking their form slowly; experimental exercises and essays.

NB: Do you have any advice to give, or a message to relay, or a practical solution to communicate to other filmmakers in the world that find themselves in an oppressive situation?

BK: It’s a difficult question to reply to because each person lives in a particular situation and has to confront different challenges and threats as he or she is making work. In any case, what I have learned from my own situation, is that one has to stay honest with oneself and do only as much as is possible in a given situation. The oppression can also come from inside oneself, or in any case, be the result of outside pressures that we repeat unto ourselves. The only solution that I see is to believe in yourself and your projects, and to not succumb to the doubts that are caused by outside forces.  On the other hand, we cannot pretend to provoke huge changes by making films, if not by putting out ideas and experiences that we have lived through and contemplated in the present and in the long term. We must believe in our projects even when confronted with antagonistic forces. I believe that we must also listen to the voice inside us, to not be afraid to make alliances and to create our own context in order to be able to express ourselves while facing the obstacles. Each context and each person also changes as time goes by, and it is difficult for me to know how I would act today if I were in the same situation as in 2009, during the Iranian elections, for example. We cannot calculate everything, and even less so control what happens around us, but we can remain faithful to our principles and to a certain ethic in our methods. I think that we can at least be sure of not losing the essential: our beliefs, our passion, and our attention, which allow us to practice creativity and to combat oppression, in whatever forms it comes in. In the end, silence is always worse than speaking out and suffering the consequences.

Paris-Mexico, 2013-2015.

Translated by Brad Stevens and revised by Bani Khoshnoudi.

Bani Khoshnoudi’s website: http://www.penseesauvagefilms.com

* René Parize, « Savoir de soumission ou savoirs de révolte ? L’exemple du Creusot », in Jean Borreil (dir.), Les sauvages dans la cité. Auto-émancipation du peuple et instruction des prolétaires au XIXe siècle, Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1985, pp. 91-103.

L’article An ethics of questioning. <br>An interview with Bani Khoshnoudi est apparu en premier sur Each Dawn a Censor Dies.