It was probably only a question of time before art and cultural programmes, or even entire festivals, were devoted to the themes terror and violence. After all, in the wake of September 11, 2001, there was a widespread feeling of uncertainty, in the cultural field as well - a feeling that, almost as if a vacuum had opened up, called for processing and digesting, rectification and reassurances. The range of these compensative, »mandatory reactions« to supposedly undreamt-of acts of violence could also immediately be gauged: they went from what seemed like rather ineffectual, abstract professions of belief (»Of course we are all against violence«) to pseudo-provocations (»The Twin Towers have committed suicide,« as Jean Baudrillard tried to express it) that were also of a mostly abstract nature. They seldom refer to concrete arenas of conflict - except for the new, commonplace topos »Ground Zero.« A kind of humanistic, generalised condemnation of violence tends to prevail, without any further examination of the genealogy and contextuality of political, social or, for that matter, individual conflict situations. The »catastrophic« so easily becomes fixed as an anthropological constant that is only to be countered - a little helplessly, in the main - by the putative power of the civilisatory process.

»Catastrophe« was also the title of the extensive special programme at the 48th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen; and the organisers were at pains from the start to explain that (and above all, why) this theme had been chosen long before September 11, 2001. »Catastrophe« was not to focus just on the way political circumstances can powerfully and abruptly affect the lives of individual people, but to go much, much further afield: from historical films dealing with the two great European wars, to the threatening and ever more frequent scenarios of manmade or natural environmental disasters, to the »Future of Fear« (as one part of the programme was called), which in Western societies could naturally result from increased public surveillance and biopolitical control. However generously and, at times, loosely this field of the catastrophic was defined, most of the programme sections, compiled and presented mainly by the overall curator, Florian Wüst, endeavoured to give exact localisations and contextualisation of the images of violence that were shown. The abundant apocalyptic fantasies from throughout the 20th century were always counterpointed by individual tales of survival, and all sorts of states of emergency from around the globe were matched by post-war scenarios and subjective methods of dealing with trauma. And even if the occasional »Baudrillardism« sometimes seemed to be unnecessarily dominant (»Humans prefer to stage their own death as a species«), this type of generalisation was given the lie by the large number of films and videos in which pictures from specific arenas were shown.

One of these arenas is currently the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with its complex historical and geographical fronts. In her video documentary »Hay mish Eishi« (»This Is Not Living,« 2001), the Palestinian filmmaker Alia Arasoughly portrays eight women and their daily lives in the occupied territories shortly after the start of the second Intifada in the autumn of 2000. She does not present any spectacular personal stories of resistance, but documents everyday restrictions and individual experiences outside the realm of »large-scale politics«: It is made increasingly difficult for a Palestinian boutique owner to reach her shop behind the security checkpoints, and when she finally gets there, there are no customers anyway; a female student tells of the death of her little brother, who was shot by soldiers while throwing stones; in the following discussion with the audience, the film director explains the meaning of the Arabic word »shaheed« (»martyr's death«): the word means »death fighting the enemy« in general, she says - any fundamentalist or even terrorist connotations came only as a result of the growing influence of radical Islamic movements or distortions by the Western media. One of the women portrayed in the film works for a television station in Nablus where the operations of the Israeli army are recorded meticulously, although these pictures will never reach a larger global audience. None of the international media that have gathered in Ramallah since the end of 2000 are interested in the everyday life of civilians, she says, so it is left to filmmakers like Arasoughly to record their »thwarted« lives.

But in the programme »Geographies of Survival,« in which »Hay mish Eishi« was shown, sub-curator Ursula Biemann has also included a story of a quite different kind about memories and survival - one that happened 55 years previously in Europe. In »The March« (1999), the Jewish-American filmmaker Abraham Ravett asks his mother time and time again - over a period of thirteen years - about what happened on the »death march« from Auschwitz, which she was forced to go on. His mother, whom one sees becoming increasingly old and frail in the course of the film, repeatedly goes back over her memories: about how the Nazis evacuated Auschwitz in January 1945 in the face of the Allied advance, and sent the prisoners, wearing wooden clogs and without any food, on a deadly three-month-long march all over Germany; how she found a packet of sugar in a barn where they spent the night, and shared it with another debilitated female prisoner; how she no longer knew exactly who rescued her in April '45. This method of persistent, intimate enquiry into the - in this case private, familial - horror makes it apparent how remembering past atrocities must of necessity remain an unfinished process. At the same time, the film makes it clear how necessary and »productive« it is to continually call to mind one of the »catastrophicalest« 20th century stories of injustice, and, above all, to keep it in mind - especially in a small, private context.

The short movie »Yawmiyat ahir« (»Diary of a Male Whore,« 2000) by the Palestinian director Tawfik Abu Wael, which was shown as part of the section »After the War,« demonstrates a completely different way of coming to terms with a disastrous past. This film version of the novella »Al-Khubz al-Hafi« (»For Bread Alone«) by the Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri is about a Palestinian rent boy who finances his livelihood in Tel Aviv through Israeli clients. In the central flashback episode, one sees the parents' land - and the way they work on it - before the Israeli army invades in 1967, and a soldier rapes the main character's mother. Dispossessed of his land, he is still coming to terms with his trauma thirty years later by giving anonymous Israelis blowjobs for 50 shekels, or masturbating in the car of an elderly man without being touched by him - a slightly hypertrophic, yet powerful sexual allegory of the political conflict, which also continually thwarts individual desire (on both sides). In comparison with these explicit films of political trauma, the two Israeli entries in this year's Short Film Festival competition seemed somewhat more guarded, not to say politically disillusioned: »Makom Project: Allenby Passage« (Director: Nurith Aviv, 2002) uses a single long tracking shot to show the simultaneous variety of a street in Tel Aviv, while »Edi« (Director: Ilan Ben Odiz, 2001) translates the morning depression of a young man about the relationship he is in into volatile, faded pictures. »Edi,« too, marks a sudden disruption of desire. The question of whether, or in what way, official politics are involved here, however, is banished to the wings.

As early as 1991, shortly after the outbreak of the Gulf War, Elia Suleimann had depicted the situation of an exiled Palestinian intellectual in the face of the confused political situation - Israel had suddenly become the target of Iraqi Scud missiles. »Takreem bil katel« (»Homage by Assassination«) is about a solitary scriptwriter (Suleiman himself) in an almost empty apartment in New York, where news of the Gulf War and the attack on Israel increasingly affect his daily routine and work, throwing him off balance. The main character photocopies a bouquet of flowers and faxes it to a woman friend in Israel as a birthday greeting. The friend (Ella Shohat) sends him back a thank-you letter, in which she explains the precarious situation of Jews of Arab descent (so-called Mizrahims) in Israel: no tragedy caused by the Iraqi missile attacks in Israel, she writes, could make up for what the American bombings were doing to innocent civilians in Baghdad. The film leaves behind a mood of lasting helplessness, particularly with regard to the affiliations and alliances that still play a role in crisis scenarios of the sort described here. Precisely this vividly depicted situation of exile (a stateless Palestinian in a country that is now waging war against an Arab nation, which in its turn takes revenge on Israel, which once occupied parts of Palestine) makes it clear what sort of concrete lines of breakage - in this case several overlapping ones - a state of emergency inscribes on the lives of individuals. »Takreem bil katel« has a correspondingly broken, ironic ending: one sees pictures of Palestinians throwing stones during the first Intifada to the Biblical saying »Whoever is without sin should throw the first stone.«

Elia Suleiman's »Cyber Palestine« (2000) did not run in any of the official programmes in Oberhausen, but was screened at the film market accompanying the festival. In it, Palestine appears as a virtual cyber-territory: on the web page cyberpalestine.org, which the main figure is always visiting and which anticipates in allegorical fashion the founding of an independent state, is written »Under construction.« The new information and communications technologies have begun reformatting the life of exiles and refugees. When a »Gabriel« calls on their mobile phone, the protagonist and his pregnant wife set out from the camp where they live in the Gaza Strip towards Bethlehem, to bring their child into the world there. They arrive on their motorbike at the heavily fortified Erez Checkpoint, where the man responds to a provocative remark from an Israeli soldier - that the child cannot possibly be his - by hitting him. Thereupon he is beaten up by the guards and put behind bars. At the end of the film, one sees the woman riding down a long road alone, while the child - whether it likes it or not - has to grow up in a refugee camp. »Cyber Palestine,« produced as part of the project »Bethlehem 2000« (www.bethlehem2000.org), appropriates the Christian story of redemption, giving it a desperate, ironic turn. »Terror« is here the unbridgeable intersection between virtual promises and the impossibility of realising them or oneself.

»Catastrophe« included another recent contribution that also deals with the impossibility of redemption through large-scale politics, and the resulting erratic private conflicts: »Crni Gavrani« (»Ravens,« 2001) by director Zelimir Gvardiol, from former Yugoslavia, recapitulates the story of how the family of a man killed in the NATO air attacks in the spring of 1999 is awarded a medal for bravery. While the proud grandfather would love to accept the medal, the father of the killed soldier refuses any decoration from the state. He explains this in no uncertain terms to a high-ranking army officer, finally trampling on the medal in front of the running camera. This episode leads not only to a lasting rift in the family, but also to the »realisation,« expressed on the side, that only the Yugoslavian people has the right to put Milosevic on (deserved) trial. At this point, the film breaks off, and the audience is made aware of the unfulfilled right to self-determination of a state that was once of a multicultural constitution, and is now left to disintegrate.

Twenty years previously, the Skopje-born director and cameraman Karpo Godina made a magnificent film about the multiethnic population of Vojvodina: »Zdravi ljudi za razonodu« (»Litany of the Happy People,« 1971) shows the inhabitants - Croats, Slovaks, Russians, Hungarians, etc. - in static pictures in front of their variously painted houses, to the accompaniment of obsessively intoned songs about the love of these different nations to one another. Godina, who, together with the Serbian director Zelimir Zilnik, was the subject of a special programme in Oberhausen, belonged - also like Zilnik - to the »Black Wave« of Yugoslavian film. This movement produced a large number of films criticising social conditions and, above all, socialism, between 1966 and 1973. Zilnik's early works, such as »Nezaposleni ljudi« (»The Unemployed,« 1968) or »Crni film« (»The Black Film,« 1971, about ten homeless people in Novi Sad), vividly depict the completely normal state of rootlessness that the sub-proletariat had to come to terms with, even under Tito-style socialism. Zilnik left Yugoslavia in 1973 as a persona non grata under special government surveillance. He went to West Germany, and in the three years before he was kicked out of the country to end up in the Tito state once more, he made films about the growing power of the surveillance state and the increasingly totalitarian West German methods of combating terrorism in the early to mid-seventies, among other things.

Present forms of terror and their intimate connection to cinematic »spectacularisation« were the subject of another section of »Catastrophe.« When, on September 11, the unforeseen event struck at the heart of the Western world, it was not only the hijackers who had carefully calculated the visual media effect of their action in advance: the local filmmakers, too, had their cameras at the ready. The programme »Terror and Spectacle,« put together by media artist and theoretician Keith Sanborn, presented some of these testimonies, several of which could not have been any more conflicting or contrapuntal. They demonstrated once again the incalculable added value of the (spontaneous) making of pictures, above all in times of war. In »Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten« (»A Tale of Days Long, Long Past«), made on digital video, Jonas Mekas first uses a quote from Heinrich Heine and a picture motif taken from »Alice in Wonderland« as a comforting background, before showing unedited pictures of the burning tower, filmed from the roof of a Manhattan apartment block, to the accompaniment of an increasingly hysterical voice. »Great Balls of Fire« (2001), directed by Leon Grodski and co-edited together with Pearl Gluck, shows a homeless man in New York, a dying breed in the city since Mayor Giuliani took over: he sings »Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On,« »Great Balls of Fire,« »Hound Dog« and other rock'n'roll classics to the rattling rhythm of his collecting tin. Finally, the camera swings over his shoulder to show the smouldering inferno only a few hundred metres away. »That shit has been going on for hundreds of years,« says the man laconically, and is surprised to see that on this day the people around him seem to be rushing through the ravine-like streets even more hectically than usual. Another convincing demonstration of the sort of bizarre (private) dramas that can be produced when politics break into everyday life in the Western world.

Indeed, the judiciously selected programmes of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival allowed one to ascertain that violence, terror and catastrophes have helped again and again to produce new formats of visualisation - of a unique type - throughout history: from the vivid newsreels about the spectacular crash of the »Hindenburg« near New York in 1937, to documentary fictions on the fates of exiles in the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to the most recent testimonies about the increasingly anonymous threat perceived by a steadily growing terror paranoia. The multifarious effects of these fears, which are often given cinematic reinforcement, remain real, and thus representable. They are what inscribe ever-new traces from the life-world into the visual memories of the present day.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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