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Cinema and Human Rights Days

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This post was contributed by Dr Emma Sandon, Lecturer in Film and Television, Department of Media and Cultural Studies

What is the impact of cinema in raising public awareness of human rights? Can films about human rights make a difference and promote political change? These are some of the questions that the Cinema and Human Rights Days addressed at the Gordon Square cinema, Birkbeck, on 15 and 16 March. Timed to coincide with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London, Birkbeck hosted a debate on human rights cinema, a screening of Salma and a Q & A with the documentary film director, Kim Longinetto, and heard John Biaggi, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival director and Nick Fraser, the BBC commissioning editor of Storyville, talk about their promotion of human rights films and programmes.

John Biaggi talked about how important it was that ‘good’ human rights films were selected for the Human Rights Watch Film Festival and he explained how that criteria was arrived at, whilst Nick Fraser, in his discussion of the importance of storytelling for any programme that television commissioned, admitted that ‘the spectacle of injustice is always gripping’. Rod Stoneman, former commissioning editor at Channel 4 and director of the Irish Film Board, presented a timely discussion and screening, in the week that Hugo Chavez died, of Chavez: Inside the Coup (also entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Televised|) (2003), a film that caused media controversy when it was screened on the BBC and which was turned down by the Amnesty International Film Festival in Vancouver for being biased in favour of Chavez. Participants then watched the Human Rights Watch Film Festival screening of Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s film, Fatal Assistance (Haiti/France/US, 2012), an indictment of the international community’s post- earthquake disaster intervention and the failure of current aid policies and practices. The screening was followed by a discussion with the director at the ICA.

Dr Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, from Birkbeck’s School of Law, and I asked participants to consider the politics of human rights discourse in film. What is a human rights film? How has the notion of a human rights film emerged? Can we talk about a history of human rights cinema? How are human rights films selected, promoted and circulated through film festivals, broadcasting, cinema theatrical release, dvd sales and internet distribution? What are the criteria by which a human rights film is judged?

I discussed how the human rights film has been constituted by human rights film festivals, first set up in the late 1980s and 1990s by human rights organisations, to promote human rights advocacy. The Human Rights Watch Film Festival and the Amnesty International Film Festival (now Movies that Matter), the two largest of such initiatives, then established the Human Rights Film Network in 2004, to ‘promote the debate on the ethics, professional codes of conduct and other standards regarding human rights film making.’ The charter of this network seeks to promote films that are ‘truthful’ and that have ‘good cinematographic quality’. It is these criteria of style and taste that become politically charged in the process of commissioning, selecting and curating films. If we look at a range of examples, it becomes clear that the subjects of human rights films are constituted in specific ways. However the way in which film represents human rights and engages viewers and audiences are complex. It is important that we understand the effects of the different audio and visual narrative and rhetorical devices used in films, be they feature films, documentary, newsreel, essay films, community or advocacy video.

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera reflected on the dimension of political agency shown in films that represent revolutionary struggle in Latin America. Drawing on his forthcoming book, Story of a Death Untold, The Coup against Allende, 9/11/1973, and screening clips from Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s, Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del Subdesarrollo) (Cuba, 1968) and Patricio Guzmán’s documentary, Battle of Chile (La Batalla de Chile) (Cuba, 1975, 1976, 1979), he weaved a layered narrative of the human potential for change. These important political films engage with the portrayal of what he termed the ‘discourse of anxiety’ and the ‘discourse of tenacity and courage’ in relation to people’s belief in the possibilities of social transformation and their ability to fight for freedom. These films are also tributes as well as memorials to those who have struggled for real social and political change.

The event was the result of a collaboration between Birkbeck, the University of Galway and Middlesex University and was supported by Open Society Foundations. The organisers hope to run this event in conjunction with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival again next year at Birkbeck.

The podcasts of this event are available on the School of Arts website.

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Chris Marker Study Day

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This post was contributed by Ricardo Domizio, an MPhil candidate, in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies

The Chris Marker Study Day held in Birkbeck Cinema on 23 February was the inaugural event of the newly formed Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI).

The event was organised and hosted by Dr Michael Temple, and was kicked off with a few introductory words by Professor Laura Mulvey. She indicated how apt it was to initiate BIMI’s programme of research symposia with a day dedicated to a filmmaker who worked so creatively and conceptually with the complexity of cinema – a kind of “patron saint,” as she said, for cinephiles everywhere. Structured around a cluster of short screenings, the day proved a fascinating insight into Marker’s lesser known collaborative works, interspersed with commentary and discussion from invited speakers.

Chris Darke, who is writing a new book on Marker’s most famous work, La Jetée, took over to introduce two short, relatively unknown film essays, with commentaries written by Chris Marker. The first, Three Cheers for the Whale (Mario Ruspoli, 1972, 17m), is mostly composed of a series of still pictures depicting man’s age-old relationship with the whale. The word ‘still’, though, should not be confused with ‘static’, as the means by which Marker and his collaborators put the stillness into motion (physically via rostrum work, and metaphorically through the poetics of commentary) was one of the issues picked up in the following discussion. The next screening, A Valparaiso (Joris Ivens, 1963), is a quirky documentary about the eponymous Chilean port town, exhibiting a similar ecological edge as the Whale film, but one gradually displaced by a more anthropological eye.  The initial idiosyncrasy of the images (women walking pet penguins down the street!) is gradually overtaken by a more serious and political slant, as the film begins to focus on the plight of the poor and the desperate. One of the more interesting lines of discussion afterwards explored Marker’s political sensibilities in the post-war period generally, and the ways in which his films might speak a non-doctrinaire politics of the left during the heady decade of the 1960s.

The morning sessions were now and then seasoned with tantalising snippets of information about Marker’s famously eccentric, if not mythologized, personal history. The fact that this master essayist of French cinema was elusive about his place of birth, and refused to be photographed or interviewed, increased his enigmatic aura. On the other hand, the fact that he fought in the French resistance and the US Army during the war, and that he was inseparable from his pet cat, Guillaume, made him seem truly human. The traces of this unique persona were vividly in evidence in the next screening of the afternoon, a UK premiere of Agnès Varda’s visit to Chris Marker’s studio (2011). A long standing friend, Varda was granted special access to film the sacrosanct space of the artist’s studio (which doubled as his home). The result was rather like a home video that voyeuristically but affectionately rifled through the jumble of assorted hardware, software, books and trinkets. Naturally, Marker himself did not want to be filmed, but his disembodied voice did embellish the production, cutting a rather understated and avuncular figure. We learn, not surprisingly given his predilection for travel, that Marker exists as an avatar on an archipelago in Second Life.

Next on the agenda was a screening of Remembrance of things to come (2011), a documentary made by Marker and Yannick Bellon on the life and work of the photographer Denise Bellon. A pioneer of photojournalism, Bellon’s photographs evocatively capture an extraordinary period in French culture and social history from the 1930s to the 1950s. An aspect of Marker’s work that has perhaps not had the attention it deserves, but which is made explicit in this film, is its empathy with surrealism. Bellon not only documented the first surrealist exhibition in 1938, she was also a friend and associate of the leading lights of the surrealist movement. Marker’s pithy and redolent commentary (read by actress Alexandra Stewart), brings forth a kind of ominous surrealism that marks the whole of the pre-war situation in France. After the screening Professor Janet Harbord gave a talk on the film that picked up the theme of surrealism and its paradoxical use in Marker’s work, which is often classified as ‘documentary’. She also spoke about other important features that run through the film and the wider oeuvre: a fascination with the sensuality and movement that lies within the supposedly ‘cold’ and ‘still’ photograph; and the possibility of achieving the complex personal and political truths that reside between narrative, memory and history.

The event was brought to a close with another UK premiere, To Chris Marker: An Unsent Letter (2012). As the title suggests, the film is an homage to Marker made by an erstwhile production colleague, Emiko Omori. It consists of a collection of interviews with Marker’s friends and collaborators animated with musings and vistas relating to his life and work. A tender and heartfelt farewell to an admired friend, the film exhibits a similar tone of remembrance and mourning that permeated much of Marker’s own work, but with a sentimental edge that Marker largely eschewed.

Overall, the day was mostly effective in widening the field of study from the rather narrow set of films that constitute the more conspicuous Marker canon, and in providing a tiny (and necessarily partial) insight into the personal life and working methods of this most private and ‘unclassifiable’ of French post-war auteurs.

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“Visual and other pleasures” by Laura Mulvey

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This post is contributed by Dr. SE Barnet, an artist and Associate Lecturer at Central St. Martin’s

BIH Celebrates Laura Mulvey, Saturday 9 February 2013

One of the most enjoyable aspects of this event was the informal atmosphere of the day.  Laura Mulvey’s friends and colleagues gave a series of introductions, each introducer introducing the next introduction, acknowledging their near parody in doing so. Familiar names and faces filled the room, and of course, references to pleasure were not overlooked.

The other delight of the afternoon was seeing Mulvey’s films and videos, most of which can be difficult to find, outside of ubuweb. Seeing her videos Marilyn and on Imitation of Life were a treat, as was her extemporaneous commentary over a clip from Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt). Her wealth of cinematic knowledge opens up film scenes to richer readings and interpretations. The term palimpsest cropped up frequently in her presentations and for good reason. Mulvey highlights what is hidden in plain sight. Commenting on a background of movie posters papering the wall behind Fritz Lang’s character of the director in Le Mépris, she enlightens us to Godard’s own influences and cinephilia of the 1950s Hollywood studio system. The film as palimpsest is not the pentimento of the painting. These traces are intentional, not reversed or negated.

Brecht’s influence was a central theme over the course of the event as well.  In Mulvey’s video on Douglas Sirk’s film Imitation of Life, she shows us the Brechtian gesture of Sirk’s mise-en-scène. Not only does she focus on the camera’s lingering close up of Lana Turner’s legs in the crane shot at the beach and the subsequent emphasis on Turner’s breasts, but through her slowing down and stopping of the scene, Mulvey shows us something quite extraordinary. With this viewing technique she demonstrates Sirk’s contrasting representations of women; white/black, spectacle/ordinary, negligent/maternal. And then she stops the scene on a frame that viewed in normal time would last less than a second. Behind Turner, in the background, a young, well-dressed black woman has taken Turner’s previous position on the stairs. And just as Turner was photographed by the man at the foot of the steps, so is this woman. Is Sirk covertly suggesting a black woman may assume a sophisticated role comparable to a white woman? This would have been a radical presentment for 1950s America. Then Turner sweeps back to the steps, knocking into the photographer as she does, re-instating her place.

The access Mulvey provides to these hidden gems comes as a result of what she describes as her preferred viewing experience. She insists a first viewing should be linear, from start to finish. But then, the viewer should let her instinct guide her viewing, lingering over those moments that pervade and prickle. Slow down and stop. Repeat. Reviewing as a methodology of informing the viewership. And then she should return to the linear viewing, now educated into the language of the film, able to derive fully the pleasure offered.

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Cross Dressing in Silent Film: Ernst Lubitsch’s I Don’t Want to Be a Man! (Ich mochte kein Mann sein!, Germany, 1918)

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This post was contributed by Rosalyn Croek, a student on Birkbeck’s MA Cultural Studies

Birkbeck Arts Week 2012 was a chocolate box of assorted events for an arts enthusiast to pick from, a platform for students and tutors across the arts courses to engage in a more open setting, tutors expressing the very latest research through a particular theme or object for their session.  At the close of the week, this event doubled as good old-fashioned Friday night entertainment, wine and a silent comedy screening which resounded to much laughter in the room at 43 Gordon Square.

Silke Arnold-de Simine introduced the film, this event in part a launch for the book she has co-written with Christine Mielke on cross dressing in German film comedies from 1912 to 2012.  The book is only available in German but others can consult a chapter Silke wrote in the most recent Blackwell’s Companion to German cinema, about Weimar cross-dressing comedies and their Hollywood remakes. Did you know Some Like It Hot has a German original?

Ernst Lubitsch’s I Don’t Want to Be a Man! (Ich mochte kein Mann sein!, Germany, 1918), centres on tomboy Ossi who enjoys poker, smoking, and drinking, shunning the delicacy expected of her and mocking the authority figures of her uncle, her strict and corseted governess, and new male guardian Dr Kersten.  Her preferred activities denied to her as a female, she decides to dress up as a man, making for a humorous scene when she is fitted out for a tailcoat at the shop.  Her disguise is actually completely successful; she revels in female attention and in a twist drinks with Dr Kersten at a nightclub – with the two sharing a kiss. The comedy owes much to Ossi’s ‘physical and exuberant acting style’.

Director Ernst Lubitsch went to Hollywood, Silke explained, but star actress and producer of cross dressing cinema in her own right, Ossi Oswalda, real name Oswalda Stäglich, sadly died in poverty in Prague. 

Silke explained the mechanism of cross-dressing comedy in film and prior to that popular theatre by asking us to think of familiar film Mrs Doubtfire (1993), where, as well as gender, variables age, class and nationality are also changed.  ‘The comedy stems from the accumulated and exaggerated discrepancies between appearance and behaviour, on the one hand, and the allegedly authentic identity on the other hand’.  She continued, ‘stories centring around disguise and mistaken identity can be seen as playfully countering anxieties concerning the successful fulfilment of social roles and mobile identities.  They can equally be geared to subvert or to provide symbolic reassurance, questioning or confirming the boundaries of social conformity’.

Nowadays, Silke reminded, we are more accustomed to men cross dressing as women but in the early twentieth century, women cross dressing as men was also prevalent, roles played by Weimar stars like Asta Nielsen and Elisabeth Bergner.  Men dressing as women was considered problematically associated with homosexuality, but women dressing as men was more socially acceptable and even becoming quotidian as women had taken over some men’s jobs during World War 1. That social change could feel threatening to men however, particularly to already-defeated German men, and thus well a time at which ‘I don’t Want to Be a Man’ might ring true – certainly Ossi learns that being a man has its difficulties. Silke also highlighted an alternative interpretation, centring on Magnus Hirschfeld’s widely-accepted contemporary theory The Third Sex, that ‘I don’t want to be a man’ could be read as ‘I don’t want to be a heterosexual’.

The film, Silke closed, was a success with critics and cinemagoers at the time, and was certainly successful with us too.

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Charleys Tanten und Astas Enkel. Hundert Jahre Crossdressing in deutschen Filmkomödien (1912-2012). Trier: WVT (Filmgeschichte International. Ed. by Uli Jung)

Cross-dressing and National Stereotypes: The German-Hollywood Connection. In: Companion to German Cinema. Ed. by Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2012, pp. 379-404.

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