Category: GFF strand – Gestures of Memory: After the Archive

In the back of a Palestine solidarity group’s offices in Japan, the filmmaker finds a bunch of old film reels in canisters, and takes them to be digitised and preserved. This film is what he found.

So, before we get into the content of the films, I wanna talk about the structure of the movie overall. This film is an attempt to give the audience the same experience the filmmaker had. This is basically just a series of shorts played one after another. R21 may be a feature-length documentary, but watching it just feels like sitting down for an evening of short films. The filmmaker keeps his presence to a minimum, showing a prologue of the discovery of the film reels, and between shorts a few seconds showing the computer screen where the film is being uploaded into digitising software. That’s it. The rest of the film just plays the shorts back to back, and there is no narration giving historical context for each. Neither are the films placed in chronological order, you watch them in the order the filmmaker discovers them.

I get that this is to give you an unmediated experience with the content in the same manner that the filmmaker had. That’s the direction he chose to go in. Personally I felt like I would have benefitted from more than just feeling like I was watching over the director’s shoulder while he went through these films. I would have preferred some critical input. Just something, like putting them in chronological order, like giving a bit of explanation about the major events in the Occupation of Palestine in the 1970s and 80s. To some extent, I think the filmmaker presumes that if you’re coming to see a movie about Palestine, you would either have a thorough knowledge of its history, or you are coming to it fresh to see and be shocked by the injustices without needing to be bombarded with dates and timelines. Again, personal preference, I would just like a brief context of what is happening when so I can understand what I’m watching, especially when the films themselves are out of order, jumping from 1982 to 1964 to 1976. Like, the situation on the ground is very different in each of those years, those elapsing decades matter.

Secondly, the films themselves are made by a left-wing solidarity group formed in Japan, who oppose American military occupation of Japanese land, and Japanese government support for American imperial adventures through capitalist economic and military means. Their solidarity with Palestine is based on a sense of their shared identity as people whose land is occupied by capitalist imperial state powers, and whose resistance has been met with repression. This is reflected in their language and outlook in the films, which are very much of the times in the 60s, 70s and 80s during the Cold War.

These films were all created with a purpose. While some give more space to letting victims of the Occupation speak for themselves, some are fictional dramas acting as a call to arms for the Palestinian people and create an impassioned audience to volunteer their support to the cause. There is a range of varying subjectivity across the films, and many have explicit voiceovers commanding the viewer what to feel. Seen half a century, their type of propaganda seems obvious and wildly unsubtle.

Which again, is fine, but it is presented without comment. And when I lament a lack of critical input, I don’t mean being set against an opposing viewpoint, I mean being given context so language which was used in a specific left-wing political subculture in the 70s is less jarring and more accessible to the audience that will view it in 2024.

It’s a choice. The filmmaker preferred one thing, and I preferred another. Both are valid. Any context or commentary about the short would only be adding our own viewpoints, biases, and type of propaganda over the top of that of the past. Not having that allows these films to speak for themselves.

So what about the films? There’s a range of them. As I say, one is a little drama showing children being shot and killed by the Israeli military, and their friends becoming determined to grow up and fight for the liberation of their people. Most are documentaries, interviewing Yasser Arafat about the importance of Japanese solidarity, showing demonstrations against Occupation, showing the desperate conditions people are living in in the refugee camps.

My favourite was the film Kuneitra: Death of a City, which is an interview with an elderly Christian woman whose entire town has been razed by the Israelis. She describes what her town was like before, and how the Israelis massacred the people, forcing any survivors to flee for their life, then flattened the whole town. Every building, every home, levelled to rubble. The films shows the locations she’s talking about, shows the damage. They destroyed the church, they destroyed the mosque, they shelled the minaret tower. They even desecrated the graves, so there would be no reason for anyone to ever come back. When this elderly woman is asked what she thinks should be done with the remains of Kuneitra, she says to leave it as it is. She asks what better monument could there be? “It doesn’t need anyone to explain”. As the camera pans over the utter devastation that used to be home to 20,000 people, the scene speaks for itself.

R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity is a film that manages to be interesting but not massively informative. It is great to see these little snapshots of the history of the Palestinian struggle against the Occupation, but all it does is make me wish I knew more.

An absolutely fascinating film. Filmmaker Sanaz Sohrabi examines the visual archive of BP (British Petroleum, and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company as it was back in the day) as history, ethnography, propaganda, and stolen colonial artefact.

In 1901 Britain bought a concession to explore for oil in Iran for the next 60 years, with Iran receiving only a portion of the revenues from any oil found. This geological study was the means by which Britain extracted extraordinary amounts of Iran’s oil wealth to fuel the British Empire. The photos taken of the landscape and people are a history of colonial intrusion, exploitation, and destruction.

Sohrabi is beautifully articulate, far moreso that I can be in this review, in examining how the images of people were taken of them, from them, by those in power in furtherance of the narratives which kept them in power. This film is about who controls your land, your wealth, your heritage, your image, your depiction, your story. Not simply of the past and in the past, but to this day.

The BP archive collections present a glorious endeavour, a collaborative project between the peoples of the world for the betterment of all. The Trans-Iranian railway was a huge infrastructure project meant to launch Iran as a modern nation, and it was funded entirely by oil revenues. Images of its construction show a vision for a prosperous Iranian future entwined with the benefits reaped from continued British oil exploitation. And those consigned to Iran’s past were images of indigenous Bahktiari people, presented as pre-modern, ethnographical Others, waiting with bated breath for the British to come and bring their technological wonders, to be taken with them into the 20th century.

Never mind that British geologists relied on indigenous knowledge and assistance to even to traverse the terrain, or survive the climate. Never mind that they came to detonate explosions under indigenous land in search for indications of oil. Never mind the lasting impacts ecologically, economically or socially.

“Archive is a verb. It sees. It silences.” The very act of removing these images from the people of whom they are about, to be owned, kept and portrayed in the BP archives how they see fit, denies any ability for them to be used with agency from their subjects. Survey is the first act in this process of extraction and looking is the first act of violence, an act of dominance against those done-to.

An excellent film.

The Cemetery of Cinema focuses on a young Guinean filmmaker’s search for the first film made in Guinea, and one of the first films in French-speaking Africa, Mouramani. This journey takes him on a road trip through the country, examining the reasons why film and film heritage has been allowed to be lost, despite the importance of film to people and communities.

This is one of those films that brings home to me just how much I do not know. A good documentary will do that.

For context, France was the colonial power in Guinea and had banned Africans in its colonies from making their own films. But as the movement for Independence gained momentum, African filmmakers were bravely creating films in defiance. Mouramani was one of these, created in 1953 by Mamadou Toure. It’s 23 minutes long and tells the tale of a legendary leader from Guinea’s pre-colonial history.

Trying to track the survival of copies of this film is like tracking the survival of the Guinean people, culture and imagination through successive waves of violence. This fragile suspension of human creativity in celluloid is sent out into a storm.

When Guinea gained Independence in 1958, the French went full scorched earth, destroying any infrastructure, equipment or property they considered theirs. They took everything with them they could, down to the least lightbulb. The Guineans would inherit their country but would have to start everything from scratch over again.

Nonetheless, in the optimism of a post-Independence Guinea, there were cinemas everywhere, showing films by Africans themselves. Beautiful big cinemas, small community ones, a mobile cinema, a film school with film labs as good as anywhere in the world, a raft of new filmmakers learning their trade, and a film library, beginning to collect and archive the film of the region.

But almost immediately, the new government began sliding into dictatorship. In this Cold War, era censorship was rife, all films must support the party line. The filmmaker talks to an old film censor from those times who tells him almost nothing was not cut or altered in some way. And when there was an unsuccessful attempt by a foreign power to overthrow the government, it provided the excuse for a crackdown and further power grab. Intellectuals, including filmmakers and film lecturers, were rounded up and imprisoned, or forced to flee from the country. Cinemas were smashed up, the film library looted, and film reels thrown in pits to be buried or burned.

The filmmaker looks back at this inheritance. The losses are so great that it is an accomplishment to even have an accurate list of what was lost, never mind attempt to recover it. The film Mouramani is listed by some as being about a pre-colonial leader, English listings say it is about a man and his dog, some say it is about the bringing of Islam, some that it is about a king.

The filmmaker asks members of the older generation, “Is it a myth?” Only some people know of its existence and no one has seen it. “Of course not!” they tell him, it existed, it was made and shown in their lifetime. But that’s how quickly something becomes a myth in a place where the impact and legacy of colonialism is continually erasing African history. A film can be made 70 years ago, within a human lifespan, and drift into legend. Who’s to say if the evidence is gone?

But this film is not just about the loss of cinematic heritage, it is about the continuation of it. The cinemas might be closed, but they are not abandoned. Many people still try to preserve and protect what’s inside. There are reels stored in canisters, testaments to the wide variety of films that used to be shown, from Ukraine to India to America, from cartoons to Westerns to porn. The filmmaker visits rural villages where people still remember fondly watching as a community movies on the big screen. He shows folks his camera, helps them make their own film, and screens it for the whole village. He meets young film students and encourages them to think about what films they want to make, what stories they want to tell. Everywhere he meets people with a love of film, of the collective cinema experience.

The legacy of colonialism, the cultural erasure, the pillage of wealth, the destabilisation of society, and the lasting power imbalance, all of it serves to darken the world, to rob peoples of their heritage, but all it takes is one person to carry the torch to keep the light burning.