Activating the future: political documentaries and media activism.
2006; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1543-3404
Autores Tópico(s)Philippine History and Culture
ResumoIn January 2006, Jakarta Film Festival in Indonesia banned screening of a documentary film about recent political events in East Timor. This attempt at deactivation ironically, and naturally, fueled film's potential reach. Passabe (2005), debut film of two Singapore-based filmmakers, Lynn Lee and James Leong, documents attempts (backed by United Nations [UN]) to establish East Timor's Commission for Reception in remote villages. These villages were torn apart by violence inflicted by Indonesian militia groups after 1999 referendum for independence following two decades of Indonesian rule. Named after village from which came a group that massacred seventy-four people from neighboring pro-independence villages, film follows a Passabe resident, Alexio Elu, who confessed to taking part in a massacre at a killing field called Teun Lasi near his village. Through Elu's acts of attrition, film interweaves political, social, and spiritual dimensions of attempts to restore peace. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Passabe is one of many contemporary films that document and dramatize postconflict situations. Like Passabe, Tom Hooper's Red Dust (2004), set in South Africa, deals with subject matter of Truth and Reconciliation. While Hotel Rwanda (2004, by Terry George) gives Rwanda genocide Hollywood treatment and consolation of a final and conclusive redemption, Shooting Dogs (2005, by Michael Caton-Jones) sustains a bleaker perspective that is more accusatory of failure of western governments to intervene in genocide. The documentary Shake Hands with Devil: The Journey of Rome Dallaire (2004, by Peter Raymont) follows Romeo Dallaire (the UN general who was literally abandoned by world community in midst of killings) to Rwanda ten years after genocide; it is a damning indictment of international community's overt racism and failure to act. A decade earlier, conflict that occurred in former Yugoslavia gave rise to popularly received Welcome to Sarajevo (1997, by Michael Winterbottom) and lesser-known Two Hours from London (1995, by Jill Craigie), a documentary on complexity of war in which is expressed outrage at international community's ineffective attempts at intervention. These films share a particular grimness in that they relate to actual horrific events and serve as testimonies of a collective failure to salvage claims to humanity and civilization. Yet, despite bleak subject matter, films (whether documentary or dramatized) that possess a referential relationship to recent political events have enjoyed a resurgence of public interest since early 1990s, as Linda Williams notes. (1) Observing an interest for images that reference real, Williams discerns a transformation in status of documentary truth to its postmodern equivalent. She writes about new documentaries' profound knowledge of contingency of truth and notes that the documentarian's role in constructing and staging these competing narratives thus become paramount. In place of self-obscuring voyeur of verite realism, we encounter, in these and other films, a new presence in persona of documentarian. (2) While Williams ponders effect of contingent truths on cinema verite tradition, Jane M. Gaines muses about strange association of apolitical films with social change and radical politics and wonders, is significance, if any, of reception of political documentaries in absence of a struggle? (3) Gaines considers work of political documentaries as that of enabling mimesis: Political mimesis begins with body. Actualized, it is about a relationship between bodies in two locations--on screen and in audience--and it is starting point for consideration of what one body makes other do. (4) It is worthwhile to ask what is meant when we describe a film as being political, and in present context, how we could construe political work of films such as Passabe if film deals only retrospectively with events it represents; that is, if we accept Gaines's idea of political mimesis. …
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