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2010 b oué ita PLINES n ts ofts Primate (USA 1974) - Frederick Wisemann, © Zipporah Films, Inc. BERLIN DOCUMENTARY FORUM CREDITS Foreword Artistic Director: Hila Peleg “Talk Show” (Omer Fast) is a PERFORMA Commission co-produced by Artis Contemporary Israeli Art Fund with support from the Edith Russ Site for Media Art, Research and Programme Coordinator: Oldenburg, and the Goethe Institute, Hong Kong. | “The Inhabitants of Images” Koen Claerhout (Rabih Mroué) is co-produced by Bidoun Magazine, New York, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Tanzquartier Wien I “Feminism and Performance Art”, a screen performance by Programme Coordinator: Nadja Talmi Angela Melitopoulos and Bettina Knaup, is based on the exhibition “re.act.feminism Rabih Mroué projects images of a main street in Beirut for a performance. Project Assistants: Leyla Discacciati, – performance art of the 1960s & 70s today” curated by Bettina Knaup and Beatrice E. Stammer, Akademie der Künste, Berlin | “Product of Other Circumstances” Katharina Haverich (Xavier Le Roy) is a production by Le Kwatt, co-produced by Le Musée de la danse, Photos of Hezbollah martyrs have been attached to lampposts in Intern: Thomas Radinger Rennes, special thanks to Boris Charmatz, Performing Arts Forum, Saint Erme Outre et Ramecourt | “Gaza” (Michael Mraktisch) is produced by Saarländischer the central reservation. Mroué draws his audience’s attention to Assistants: Pauleena Chbib, Lisa Rave, Alexander Röhl Rundfunk | All presented works by Joachim Koester: Courtesy Jan Mot, Brussels a confusing element – the martyrs all have the same body. The Stage Manager: Anja Lindner reality shown on the photos is manipulated in order to communicate Architecture: Kooperative für Darstellungspolitik: THANKS Jesko Fezer, Anita Kaspar, Andreas Müller AP Images, Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst, Beirut Art Center, BERLIN additional significance. The interplay between the photos and the BIENNALE, Berlin Verlag, Corbis, Deutsches Filminstitut Wiesbaden, Deutsches BDF Online-TV: Open Video – Multitude Media: Jan Historisches Museum, Ronald Feldman Gallery, FOCUS Photo- und Presseagentur various layers of meaning is the crux of this performance, which is Gerber, Ines Gerber, Sören Köhler, Susanne Lang, GmbH, Galerie Jan Mot, Galerie Lelong, Galerie Sabine Knust, Koch Oberhuber Wolff Berlin, Musée national d'art moderne - Centre Pompidou, Radio Bremen, enlightening in every respect. Simone Rau Saarländischer Rundfunk (SR), Südwestrundfunk (SWR), Westdeutscher Rundfunk Mroué’s piece clearly illustrates the role of documentary strategies (WDR), Zipporah Films, Inc. Astrid Arndt, Michel Balagué, Nathalie von Bernstorff, Lindsay Bosch, Annett in the arts, which are not concerned with simply depicting reality Editors: Hila Peleg, Bert Rebhandl Busch, Tiziana Chiaravalle, Elizabeth Corwin, Bojana Cvejic, Sandra Dagher, Valérie Managing Editor: Martin Hager Degrelle, Harun Farocki, Anselm Franke, Jörg Frieß, Gaby Gehlen, Dietmar Häger, in contrast to a fictitious reality. Instead our attention is drawn to Andréa Holzherr, Gabriele Horn, Christine Houard, Hannah Hurtzig, Ludger Ikas, Copy Editor (English): Nicola Morris Markus Jochem, Margot Klingsporn, Sabine Knust, Matthias Kunz, Oliver Laqua, how we construct reality with our signs, images and symbols. The Copy Editor (German): Jörg Hartung Armin Linke, Adi Nachman, Olaf Nicolai, Frauke Nissen, Eva Markovits, Mai Meksa- wan, Daniele Maruca, Vincent Mutsaerts, Gertrud Nippen, Nikolaus Oberhuber, crucial step consists of leaving behind art as a self-referential Translation English-German: Bert Rebhandl Mile Penava, Chris Rehberger, Jean-Pierre Rehm, Avi Pitchon, Irit Rogoff, Joshua Translations German-English: Nicola Morris Simon, Carrie C. Roseland, Saint-Gervais Genève, Michele Sarrazin, Catherine system of signs and admitting an external reality upon which our Schelbert, Carsten Siebert , Kasey Skeen, Peter Trentmann, Anne Tyderle, Solidea Design: Double Standards Valenti, Renate Wagner, Eveline Walendzus, Katharina Webersinke, Cornelia own language can be constructed. Print: pickme Wilhelm, Nicole Wolf, Cecile Zoonens Different constructions of reality on the basis of different languages All texts © the authors and systems of signs have been a central theme for the Haus der

With the kind support of: Kulturen der Welt since its inception. Its very name implies the tension HAUS DER KULTUREN DER WELT the Embassy of the French Republic, Culturesfrance, the Embassy of the United Director: Bernd M. Scherer States of America, the Royal Thai Embassy, and the Embassy of the Federative inherent in the relationship between interpretative and semiotic Head of Communications: Silvia Fehrmann Republic of Brazil. systems, namely between culture and reality, in other words, the Press Officer: Anne Maier world. Media Partner: Head of Visual Arts: Valerie Smith However, over the last twenty years it has become ever more Project Coordination Film: Doris Hegner Technical Director: Jochen Petzold necessary to devote greater attention to this relationship, for several Head of Audio and Video Engineering: André Schulz reasons. Firstly, there is the rapid development of the media which,

Head of Event Engineering: Hermann Volkery The Haus der Kulturen der Welt is supported by thanks to the technological opportunities offered by digitalisation, is Assistant to the Technical Director: Harald Weißmann increasingly beginning to lead an independent existence beyond the association with non-media based realities. Additionally, increasing

aufgrundon the basis eines of a Beschlussesresolution adopted des Deutschenby the German Bundestage Bundestags mobility has caused direct competition between various means of representation and their associated ways of seeing the world. This places the question of their relationship to the world in a new light. Last but not least, we are currently clearly in a transitional phase brought about by the developments mentioned above, among other things, where the old frames of reference are being questioned, necessitating the development of new representational forms and content within the debate about a reality in flux. The BERLIN DOCUMENTARY FORUM will make a contribution to this debate by incorporating a range of contemporary and historical perspectives.

Bernd M. Scherer, Director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt

4 5 Documentary Practices and assessed. This can – and indeed must – of documentary film, driven by the question- The means by which images create social Across Disciplines include a reflection of one’s own speaking ing of claims to power and truth. The second identities and construct histories, furthermore, position as a producer of images and nar- programme “Missing Image”, devised by is the subject of a conversation between Hila Peleg ratives, and a critical interrogation of the Florian Schneider, reflects on the period from cultural historians Ariella Azoulay and Issam power politics inherent to signification, of the 1960s to the 1980s in which structural Nassar, who look at archive photographs the economies in which images and histories violence sanctioned by society and the state from the late 1940s to the early 1950s taken When we hear ‘documentary’, we commonly circulate, and the performative nature of was at the centre of the critique articulated in Palestine and Israel in a comparative think of documentary films. The field of the montage, rhetorics, gestures, staging and by politically engaged documentaries on examination of two conflicting spaces of documentary, however, can be understood frames. German public TV. The programme is about memory. – and indeed must be, as this project main- missing images in two senses: the missing tains – in much broader terms. In the past This definition of documentary practices or distorted image of the socially and polit- The inclusion into and the exclusion from decades, the widespread belief in any form encompasses a much broader field of ically excluded; and the fate of those films historical accounts and archives, or the point of non-fiction as generating neutral, truthful engagements, including literature, visual art, which today are missing from television where a decision is forced about the truth and objective representations of reality has performance, cultural history and theory. screens and the accounts of their history. or falsity of an image are genuine political been largely undermined. This is partly due The BERLIN DOCUMENTARY FORUM there- sites that give rise to multiple forms of to the general erosion of modern objectivist fore has, from the outset, been conceived The idea of ‘official’, hegemonic representa- agency. The degree to which the language claims to knowledge and representation, as a way of engaging with the ‘documentary’ tion means that only what can be repre- of the documentary is rooted in testimony and partly due to the proliferation of (e.g. digital) across a variety of disciplines, and it will sented enters the field of recognised reality. and witnessing is the subject of a multifa- technologies and their capacity to manipu- further broaden the scope of this engagement Theatre director Rabih Mroué interrogates ceted programme devised by curator Okwui late. But expectations towards ‘objective’ true in the course of its future development. images and objects from contemporary Enwezor. At the centre of this programme knowledge are notoriously persistent in Indeed, the engagement with the question of Lebanon, and questions them as witnesses are public readings of documentary literature the field of the documentary. The notion of reality (contextual, political, historical, social, and suspects alike. The disjunction between containing accounts of political events and ‘truth effects’, while common in theoretical material, etc.) has been a key concern in signs and referents, images and bodies, atrocities. These readings are framed by reflection on culture and politics, remains a artistic and discursive practices for decades. words and events that he finds, becomes a interventions in public media reflecting the scandal of sorts in mainstream media and in The self-reflexivity of the documentary testimony to the politics of a culture in the status of historical photographs, and artistic political impact. form demands a recognition that there is no aftermath of war. Such points of disjunction interventions within the HKW building. documentary form that is not ‘artistic’, ‘intel- are also the subject of “A Blind Spot”, the The initiative for this project derives from the lectual’ and ‘political’ in its qualities. Those prequel to a larger exhibition for the second Several pieces in the festival look at the per- necessity to abandon such dichotomies qualities must be understood within the par- edition of BDF (2012) conceived by curator formative aspect of documentary accounts. and the choices they impose upon both ticular context in which they are articulated Catherine David, which looks beyond the A special performance by artist Omer Fast aesthetics and politics. The notion of truth as much as within the conditions of their pro- assumed opposition between art and docu- tests the popular format of the live talk show has been contested within the field of the duction and reception at large. mentary, fiction and non-fiction, to in- and the confessional speech in relation to documentary ever since it was first defined. vestigate the real as opaque, ephemeral spectacle, authenticity and ‘oral history’. Some forms have been explicitly denounced This first biannual festival is structured and even obscure. Another live performance explores the body as particular modes of producing ‘truth’ in around six special thematic programmes as a living archive of sorts: choreographer the service of hegemonic powers, and that developed and realised by commissioned The contemporary erosion of claims to Xavier Le Roy’s new work is a dance very critique has given rise to other forms. curators, artists, filmmakers and theoret- power and truth in the documentary are the performance in which the documentation The ‘old’ conception of the documentary as icians, further accompanied by a selection subject of a programme planned by film and enactment of a process are brought a somewhat ‘neutral’ window to a reality ‘out of performances and conversations. programmer Eduardo Thomas, bringing together. there’ gradually gives way to a new under- together contemporary experimental films standing of the documentary as representa- An account for the shifts in the field of the from all over the world. The programme of My personal thanks go to the curators of the tional practices that are ‘reality driven’. documentary requires reemployment of its screenings and talks reflects on the heritage thematic programmes, and to all participa- history – a history in which images, forms of concepts such as authorship, authen- ting artists and contributors. I also wish to Such practices must reflect and question their and genres themselves figure as agencies. ticity and authority. thank the BDF team. Thanks too to all the means of representation in their capacity to For the inaugural edition of the BERLIN people involved in HKW. I am grateful to the account for complex, layered realities. Rather DOCUMENTARY FORUM, two filmmakers “Möglichkeitsraum” (The Blast of the Possible), architects of Kooperative für Darstellungs- than by ‘capturing’ reality, the documentary were commissioned to each develop a three ‘screen-performances’ conceived politik, who developed the spatial setting for is then characterised – and differentiated from comprehensive programme highlighting by video artist Angela Melitopoulos, looks the festival, enabling a multiplicity of modes other forms of artistic and intellectual particular genealogies of the documentary in at the possibilities of the moving image in of presentation and spectatorship in one practice such as the writing of fiction – by relation to their respective political contexts. relation to how memory works and history space, and to the members of Open Video – a commitment to actual events, histories Eyal Sivan’s programme “Documentary Mo- is narrated. The screen-performances are Multitude Media who record BDF ideas and and sites. It is such commitment that then ments” looks at how World War II, and par- live stagings of the process of montage of events and define an online space for their becomes the backdrop against which the ticularly the question of the representation of video and film archive materials, belonging presentation. means of representation are being measured genocide, has given rise to a ‘renaissance’ to the history of activist media since the 1960s.

6 7 Documentary’s the crucial medium of exchange between pa- Discursive Spaces trons and artists within the changing struc- ture of art in the nineteenth century.”2 Okwui Enwezor Recent debates about the “documentary turn”3 in art are bedeviled by the same issues out- Perhaps it is best to begin the discussion of lined above. In recent years, with the entrench- the role of the documentary in contempor- ment of large scale, absorptive, tableau-format ary art and culture under the terms of what photography in museums and exhibitions, may be called, pace Rosalind Krauss, docu- contemporary photography was signalling an mentary’s discursive spaces. If you recall, it aesthetic relationship closer to painting4 than to was at the height of the post-structuralist the fact-driven ideas of the documentary form. and postmodernist theories in the 1980s The field of contemporary art has been preoc- that Krauss pressed into service an analysis cupied with this debate and the dichotomies of the tension that exists between a photo- inherent in the shift from photographic images graphic image and a lithographic translation as facts to images as art issues and discourses of that image. In her careful analysis of the relating to the documentary form. One line of disjunction in the indexical traces that trail inquiry on the state of the documentary image after the two pictorial supplements – the and its manifestation in artistic strategies rests photograph and lithograph – she argues on the seeming irreconcilability between the that the difference between the referent and forces of art and their putative autonomy from the translation rests on the idea that “they the realms of mass media and culture and those belong to two separate domains of culture, of journalism. Art and documentary are often they assume different expectations in the seen as antagonistic to each other and, there- user of the image, they convey two distinct fore, exist in distinctly different discursive spaces. kinds of knowledge. In a more recent vo- The documentary, it is often assumed, exists cabulary, one would say that they operate in that space of representation that deals as representations within two distinct dis- mostly with the tawdry aspects of reality which cursive spaces, as members of two different feeds the insatiable appetite for the sensation- discourses.”1 If such a distinction exists be- alistic and emotional. Art on the other hand is tween these two different mediums, it is not idealistically manifested in reflexive complex- on the basis of the content of the images ities, by generating its own conditions of reality. which are inscribed on their surfaces, rather Put another way, the documentary image is to it exists on the basis of the discursive spaces art what the lithograph in the nineteenth centu- they each occupy: based on the effects of ry was to fine art photography. Their conditions their individual levels of pictorial legibility, of reception are based on the dialectic of inclu- and to wit on the difference in affect of their sion and exclusion into and outside of regimes separate aesthetic mechanisms. Krauss ex- of aesthetic discourses. One (art) seemingly plains this difference according to the way belongs to the discursive spaces of exhibition- the reception of photography at the end of ality, while the other (documentary) promotes the nineteenth century was organised by an exhibitionism. aesthetic discourse defined by the space of the exhibition. While the lithograph would With the blurring of the boundary between remain only as an illustration tool employed mass and high culture, and the induction of the in technical manuals, the photograph was mechanical and digital images and objects into transformed by its entrance into the gallery the facture of art, it seems only a particularly or museum space, hence its discursive in- conservative agenda is served in the fencing clusion into the realm of aesthetic dis- off of art and documentary. Even if such sepa- course. She writes: “Given its function as ration were thinkable, the terms of public the physical vehicle of exhibition, the gallery reception of images have certainly transformed wall became the signifier of inclusion and, the discursive spaces of both art and the doc- thus, can be seen as constituting in itself a umentary. For neither exists in purely distinctive representation of what could be called exhib- spheres of reception as the contentious con- itionality, or that which was developing as junction of the two domains already makes

9 Tony Cokes.Tony Evil.13_Alternate Versions - ONHD (c.my.skull).Image: Scott Pagano. clear when the bits and scraps of popular vanishing past. There are, obviously, “Rules of Evidence: Text, Voice, Sight” pro- on what can be conceived as the rules by media began invading the surfaces of other constraints that surround the way in poses to examine this question by closely as- which the seemingly self-explanatory condi- painting under the reign of collage. Or as which the documentary is both imagined sociating the terms of the documentary with tions of the documentary form can be anal- evidenced in the interventions of the de/ or “disimagined”6, to borrow a term from notions of testimony and witnessing that ysed. This analysis is the premise of the cu- collage aesthetics of the post-war projects Georges Didi-Huberman. have been fundamental to the nature of the ratorial proposition for “Rules of Evidence: of Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé for documentary form. The relationship be- Text, Voice, Sight”. It is situated between example. Yet it is necessary to specify that Let us examine a separate indictment of tween testimony and witnessing is part of a exhibitionality and exhibitionism. the documentary and art do not always share the documentary: its supposed ethical two-fold process that seeks a bridge be- the same logic nor operate with the same blindspot, with regard to showing the un- tween an account and its framing, a repre- “Rules of Evidence: Text, Voice, Sight” in- set of aesthetic protocols since their frames bearable, the unrepresentable, the unimagin- sentation and its reception. In other words, volves three simultaneous sequences: the have been hollowed, especially in light of able. These seeming impossibilities can “Rules of Evidence: Text, Voice, Sight” is first concerns the fact/truth-based question the increasing politicisation and sometimes sometimes confine the documentary image predicated on not simply presenting the surrounding documentary images in con- fabrications5 of documentary images along to a zone of silence, ringing it with tech- documentary as a form, but rather seeks to temporary media. In this sequence four with their potential for ideological manipula- nologies of opacity by withdrawing it from examine the discursive spaces of the form documentary photographs from the last tion. So what discursive spaces are pos- public view. Images of extreme violence and and the general conditions, techniques, and century to more recent images have been sible for the documentary today beyond the cruelty are often candidates for this kind of structures of producing diverse public infra- selected. In addition, four writers have been sphere of media, reportage and journalism? seclusion. Perhaps, because the image is structures both in the classical reception of invited to analyse these images in the form imagined as over-representing its subject images in public culture and in the institu- of short editorials that address their varied To address some of these issues, what is matter, or as too graphic in its insistence on tional framing of the meaning of the docu- representations. The four images, along required is to first evaluate what the term veracity. Such images represent a kind of mentary. However, against the tendency to with the editorials, will then be presented in documentary really represents, and secondly paradox in the manner in which the docu- offer the documentary, a priori, as purely a the taz newspaper in Berlin on the 5th of to articulate its discursive meaning. The mentary must function discursively. There- matter of exhibiting and making visible images June 2010. The images will be accompanied documentary image according to classical fore, as a general rule of thumb, the docu- or representing their visceral effects, this with questions and evaluations of their con- definitions is always that product of repre- mentary must always be tolerable, it should project seeks to put in remand – temporarily – ditions of production and reception during sentation surrounded by a nimbus of facts. not invite moral or ethical sanction against such effects. To do so, it calls for an initial the course of their circulation. In this way, Whether in its context, or subject matter, its public legibility or legitimacy. The pho- withdrawal of the image from both the the project not only addresses anew the or location, it demands that form of legibility tographer must also, should be never seen standpoint of exhibitionality and exhibitionism, critical evidentiary notions attaching to the that nothing in the frame is extraneous to as a partisan, an actor with an investment in tendencies often generalised as conditions images, but also the dialectical hole in the image, nothing added, nothing withdrawn. how the facts of the image are interpreted. of reception of the documentary genealogy which those images are plunged when their On the one hand it is an authentic artefact Despite the commonplace of the documen- as a fact/truth based social regime. veracity threatens to overshadow the singu- of the event it documents, and on the other tary image as unvarnished truth, in modern lar truths they may be telling. Mediating this it is a truthful inscription of what it repre- and contemporary culture, it is surprisingly The regime of the documentary always dialectic requires an exhibitionary frame- sents. Such authenticity and truthfulness, or surrounded by multiple prohibitions. In this seems to compel the receiver of the image work as well as a typographical formulation. facticity cannot be a supplement of an oc- sense what can be shown, what is permis- (preferably the still photograph or video image) It is on this basis that an invitation was ex- currence, not a translation or interpretation sible for public display, and what is deemed or the participant in its analysis toward a tended to Ecke Bonk, a “typosoph”, a neol- of the subject matter in the mode of what abominable to ocular decency becomes materialised explication that begins with what ogism describing the instersection of typo- the artist Jeff Wall calls “near documentary”, vital. In his essay, The Intolerable Image, may be designated as rules of evidence, graphy and philosophy. Bonk’s work is namely, an image which intentionally looks the philosopher Jacques Rancière turns to namely that its form and content be neatly concerned with thinking seriously about the like, acts like a documentary but in fact is this issue, related to documentary imagery aligned along the phenomenological axis of way typography works on the reader and receiver not a documentary. To deviate from this of the kind that disturbs both ethical and fact and truth. The documentary as such of communication, about the legibility of signs simple rule of the documentary as embody- social propriety, arguing that certain forms therefore calls for two discursive frame- within their assigned instrumental registers, ing in its inscription a direct correlation to of political art have sought to traduce this works – the testimony of the image and the be it the page or the screen, book or tab- its physical referent shatters the vessel of public sanction, thus crossing the boundary witnessing of the phenomena it contains – loid. His work will address typosophic issues both believability and trust which is part of “from the intolerable in the image to the in order to transform rules into systems of generated not only by the images but the its public fait accompli. The history of the intolerability in the image…”7 social perception. texts that they accompany. He will not so documentary is riddled with numerous mo- much design the pages for the re-circulation ments when this vessel has been shattered, But beyond the image and its various orders This classical domain of the documentary of the four images in popular media, but will either by outright for-gery or by an eager- of truth, authenticity, representability, intoler- object and its images have in the last sev- be focused on providing a discursive space ness to over-interpret or over-dramatise the ability, and so on, by what other means does eral decades proliferated such that it is im- in which the images will hopefully accrue subject for the event of the documentary the documentary signify? What are the rules possible to bring to the public arena other new discursive capital. is necessarily a testimony to something that that unite the signifier and signified in the means of reflecting the documentary object. happened. Therefore, to document is to realm of visibility or through acts of com- If there is an impasse in documentary’s The four images include Robert Capa’s fa- simultaneously witness the passing of an memoration or structures of producing truth discursive spaces, it is partially premised mous and iconic war photograph “Falling event and thus to capture and inscribe that effects that inhere to the documentary? not on the status of the image per se, but Soldier”, which depicts a loyalist militiaman

10 11 shot at a key moment of battle at the begin- the aftermath of a bombing by Israeli fighter so as to menacingly loom over the child. The shocking, is nothing secret, nothing hidden ning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The jets of a suburb of Beirut during the Hezbol- photograph caused public outrage on sev- – it offers to our sight nothing less than photograph shows the man at the moment of lah/Israel war of 2006. Hajj’s photograph eral levels, and it is this outrage that exhibition itself, the exposure of exposure… impact, as the bullet pierces and pene- had deviated from its initial documentation Jacques Rancière examines in his editorial. But the exhibition of the results, and the trates his body. His body is pitched back- of the bombing, which is not in dispute. He begins, following the public response exhibition of that exhibition for the cameras, wards by the impact of the bullet just before However, it was the effect of doctoring the to the photograph, by asking the question: remains startling. This was something you he falls to the ground. Suspended from the image by using the digital tool of Photoshop “Are such pictures acceptable?” The debate could only do for an image, for the exposure ground and yet falling, the photograph iso- to enlarge certain areas of the photograph around Carter’s picture does not have de- and the memory, for the claim it makes on lates what could be called an unrepresent- by making the plume of smoke accompany- finitive answers but it generates fresh con- the imagination of others. And on their able moment, the point between life and ing the bombing appear to cover a wider siderations about its representation and memories, their memories of other images… death. Ever since it was first published con- area than was initially the case, that brought marks the truth of its unbearability. The hun- It’s a photograph of a photograph, of the troversies have surrounded the veracity of the image to account, and a rupture in its ger for images which are truthful are coun- conditions of photography, of the presenta- this monumental example of the decisive normative status of truth. This photograph terposed to a physical hunger which enve- tion, exposure, abandonment of bodies be- moment of the documentary. Compounding represents a paradox insofar as its veracity is lopes masses of the starving. How to fore the camera. One day we will learn its the issue are recent revelations by research- concerned because it documents an actual reconcile these two hungers on the planar lesson: the photo opportunity does not sig- ers that the original caption misidentifies event, only to undermine its ethical and pro- scene of the photographic image? Rancière nal the disappearance of politics and vio- where the event occurred, therefore further fessional competency by seeking to affect writes: lence into the superficiality of the image, but raising the issue of whether this moment of public opinion or to fudge the legibility and names the necessary starting point for an death of the loyalist militiaman was staged. authenticity of the documentary fact and “But they have exchanged their parts: the understanding of the image as a site of The historian Eduardo Cadava examines artefact. Writing on this image, Emily Apter human being crawls, bowing her head over politics and violence – and for our reaction this gap in the representation of Capa’s notes that the scandal of the photograph the soil, driven by the sole instinct of survival; to it.”11 “Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, partially lies in the public’s trust in the truth the animal stands up with the quietness of Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936”, 1936, of documentary representation, which the the observer and the rigidity of the judge Each of these images operate in and are writing: doctoring violates. It is because: draped in his gown. The unbearable en- generated by specific discursive spaces and counter of two hungers takes on the shape conditions. The objective of this discursive “Rather than deliver truth, the photograph “We are psychically invested in photojour- of a quiet fable where the bird of prey also device is to move the image from the do- seems to have removed truth from percep- nalistic credibility and most people want to plays the part of the judge. Fables don’t call main of its visceral effects to the context of tion altogether. The “Falling Soldier” remains keep it that way at all costs. The lesson of for pity. But they often speak about justice. collective, social analysis. In this way the compelling, however, because it evokes all Hajj’s tainted Beirut scene, if one might be Kevin Carter shows us a court where a cer- goal is to transform the zone of evidence the modern debates over documentary pho- adduced here, lies in its exposure of our tain ‘human life’ is on trial. This is why the into a performative arena. tography’s veracity. Acting like a kind of ‘es- investment in the representation of visual small-time moralists can’t forgive him: he pejo’ or mirror, it reflects as much about the truth. In this context, the photograph stands shows that we don’t need their conscience The second sequence of this project engages violence of war as about the public’s desire as a ‘work’ of visual pedagogy, staging an for judging such situations. The animal has the arena of performativity, by an attempt for truth. It also tells us as much about the education in critical viewing.”9 already done it. What matters is to make our to shape a dialectically constructed public relation between a photograph and the stor- gaze live up to its verdict.”10 event conceived around a five-day live read- ies that seek to understand it, as it does The documentary image is supposed to ing project which will involve three books about the historical contexts in which it was perform truth effects. The social contract The final image exposes the condition of the dealing with the documentary recounting of produced… It also enacts – as it did when it surrounding such images cannot be sun- documentary at war with itself. It is a photo- historic events. These books have been first was published – the decontextualisa- dered, for to do so is to shatter the public graph embedded in the scene of an image chosen for their precise, explicit reflections tion that takes place in every photograph. trust, the believe we all invest in the search war between two machineries of media dis- centered around several historic atrocities. Signalling the enigmatic relation between for truth. But not all images provoke the course. The photograph by the Iraqi photo- The readings performed continuously over life and death, the image that seems to de- desire for truth. Some provoke the public grapher Khalid Mohammed documents the the duration of the festival proceed in a relay pict death records its own death, its own in- desire to mask the truth, to keep it from gruesome scene of the killing of Blackwater format bringing together a collectivity of voi- capacity to show or represent. The decisive public exposure, a situation that constitutes guards working in support of the American ces, both professional actors and members moment portrayed by this war photograph is the intolerable image, and its intolerability. war in Iraq. The burnt bodies of two of the of the general public reading directly from therefore the unresolved war between the One such image is the photograph, “Vulture guards strung up on the cross-beams of a the chosen texts. The principal goal is to photograph and the photographed – a force Watching Starving Child, Sudan, March, metal bridge is an image of crucifixion and have readers from across different genera- of destabilisation that, leaving us in sus- 1993”, 1993, by the late South African pho- the carnage of war, but its publication again is tions from young to old reading passages pense, keeps us falling…”8 tographer Kevin Carter. The photograph counterposed to the notion of their public from the selected books until completion. shows a scene in which the emaciated fig- disclosure. Thomas Keenan addresses this The selected books are: W.G. Sebald, On Another image the veracity of which was ure of a starving, exhausted child is question, writing: the Natural History of Destruction, on the brought to account is a now controversial crouched on the ground, head bowed into the “What sort of evidence is his picture? Does firebombing of German cities during World photograph by the Lebanese photographer dust like a supplicant. Behind her body it even belong to the realm of evidence any War II; Antjie Krog, Country of my Skull on the Adnan Hajj. It is an image which documents waits a hulking vulture, pictured in a diagonal more? What comes to light in it, however testimonies of the South African Truth and

12 13 Reconciliation Commission; and Philip and literature in differential forms, scales, with what Sadek calls post-memory is pre- “Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Mu- Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You that To- and speeds… call[ing] attention to normative sented as a trope with which to limn remem- riano, September 5, 1936” and Adnan Hajj’s “Smoke Over Beirut” were included with reference to issues of morrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, protocols of reading, and their cognitive and bering and also to account for the opacity of political manipulation and outright fabrication. While the an account of the Rwanda Genocide. Ranging political failures.” By establishing the relation memory. In “On Semaan: A Non-Vengeful Na- facts surrounding the making of the two photographs from the literary to the reportorial, to the between texts and their reception, he offers tive” (2010) Sadek presents the follow up to are all too real, namely war, the images themselves have a dialectic for “potentially excavating the raised serious questions about the blurring of the journalistic, these three books animate aspects “Mourning in the Presence of the Corpse”. It is border between documentary evidence and interpretative of the documentary form that generally make accepted terms of discourse, enabling a a short text, set in an village which has been evidence. no appearance in exhibition contexts. minor analytic against the ‘transparency’ of abandoned by its former farming inhabitants. 6 For a remarkable interpretation of the complexities of documentary images.”12 The text is centred around a character named the documentary and its relationship to atrocity see Georges Didi-Huberman, Images In Spite of All: Four The third sequence involves the work of four Semaan. Sadek sets the narrative in the cha- Photographs from Auschwitz, translated by Shane B. artists: Tony Cokes, Walid Sadek, and Juan To what extent is the documentary transparent otic rubble of a ruin in which grows a massive Ellis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) Maidagan and Dolores Zinny. These artists to the events it depicts or represents? deciduous tree, whose ripening fruit sort of 7 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 14 translated by Gregory Elliott (London and New York: were invited to respond to aspects of the Throughout this text, I have tried to grapple feeds the hunger for remembering. The ruin Verso, 2009) p.84 first two sequences or to create a context with issues related to the documentary’s is both memory and its aftermath, the post- 8 Eduardo Cadava, excerpt from the editorial contributed for their reception in an exhibition-like environ- discursive spaces, its coding, and its various memory. The ruin marks a gap in knowl- to accompany Robert Capa’s “Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936”, ment. The given rule of this participation is modes of public address. Walid Sadek’s edge of the event which can only be inscribed 1936, published in die tageszeitung, June 5, 2010. that the artists do not work with images of contribution “Mourning in the Presence of through acts of memory, and structures of 9 Emily Apter, excerpt from the editorial accompanying any kind, but rather to ground their contri- the Corpse: Thinking Sociality in Protracted memorialisation, the “waking of the dead”. Adnan Hajj’s “Smoke Over Beirut”, Beirut, 2006 pub- butions on formats such as text-based doc- Civil War” is an attempt to transform the Each of these propositions opens up the lished in die tageszeitung, June 5, 2010. 10 Jacques Rancière, excerpt from the editorial accom- umentary forms, design, and architectural/ documentary turn into an examination on the ongoing dialectic between the documentary panying Kevin Carter’s “Vulture Watching Starving sculptural responses. The overall objective conditions of witnessing and the aporias of as a visual phenomenon and as an inti- Child, Sudan, March, 1993”, 1993, in die tageszeitung, of this project is based on procedures of testimony, especially in moments when mem- mate, proximate relationship to events that June 5, 2010. 11 Thomas Keenan, excerpt from the editorial accom- animation rather than on rules of evidence ory is not an absolute ally towards a fidelity lie beyond the inscriptible, that is to say be- panying Khalid Mohammed’s “Blackwater Agents that are often grounded in the display of imag- to truth. The piece exists in the form of a yond the image. It is on this basis that Hanging from the Bridge, Fallujah”, 2004, published in es. Therefore, the physical manifestation of philosophical essay that speculates on the “Rules of Evidence: Text, Voice, Sight” exists die tageszeitung, June 5, 2010. 12 Tony Cokes, Proposal for Evil.13: Alternate Versions, the project within the confines of the Haus question of bearing witness in the intractable outside of the nimbus of facts and truth. In- 2010 der Kulturen der Welt is to set up the proto- zone of mourning, or as Sadek writes about stead, it proceeds along the edges of abyss 13 Walid Sadek, from a correspondence with the author. cols of reception, to introduce a third dis- thinking: between the intolerable and intolerability, 14 BERLIN DOCUMENTARY FORUM will present this cursive arena that connects the spaces of between veracity and fiction, visibility and new work by Walid Sadek. public mediation to the domain of literary “… the consequences of living the aftermath opacity. recitation to the medium of exhibition. In this of violence, that is of living in the ruin. The sequence, Zinny and Maidagan define an work of mourning, in the presence of the architectural limit within which the readings corpse, is marked, as far as I have theo- from the books will occur. Using soft material rised, by a ‘stay’ rather than a ‘wait’ and by such as fabric, they have created an environ- an uneasy silence or soliloquy which occupies ment that serves as a kind of proscenium in the living who stay or linger/tarry with the which the legibility of the recitations will corpse. This work of mourning is therefore be delivered. However, the architecture and without the promise of release, it is work its defined spatial contours do not confine in the sense of poesis; it makes a place. 1 Rosalind E. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde Rules of Evidence: Text, Voice, Sight and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT the performance, but rather serve as an in- Further, this text is not of the event nor does it Press, 1986) p.132 A conversation between Okwui Enwezor, Ecke Bonk, terface for public encounters. Cokes on search to return or recapture the event. It 2 Ibid, p.133 Tony Cokes, Walid Sadek, Juan Maidagan and Dolores the other hand takes the form of text-based certainly does not claim to accompany the 3 See Claire Gilman and Margaret Sundell, “The Storyteller” Zinny. Wednesday, June 2, 8.30 pm in The Storyteller, Gilman and Sundell, eds. (Zurich: jrp/ Publication in the German daily taz on June 5th with installation to deal with problems of reading (violent) event. Rather, this text is for me ringier, 2010) p. 7-69. See also my own essay in the contributions by Emily Apter, Ecke Bonk, Jacques Rancière, and comprehension as well as to penetrate part of the work that survivors do, those same volume, “What is it? The Image, Between Docu- Tom Keenan and Eduardo Cadava. the logics of testimony in relation to the who enter the place where knowledge is mentary and Near Documentary” p.73-82 Public readings of the books: On the Natural History of 4 For a discussion of this shift see Michael Fried, Why Destruction (W.G. Sebald), Country of my Skull (Antjie documentary. In his project Evil.13: Alternate born out of the work of mourning, the work Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Krog) and I Would Like to Inform You that Tomorrow We Versions he sets selected excerpts from the of forgetting and the work of waking the Yale University Press, 2008). Fried’s account of the Will All Be Dead (Philip Gourevitch) take place in the three books to a recursive stream of articu- corpse.”13 transformation of photography as art did not discuss foyer of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (June 2 to 6). lations, between the specular and the the disjunction between so-called art photography and Evil.13: Alternate Versions (installation, 2010) by the documentary. He did however, explore how the Tony Cokes and Blei in den Nähten (installation, 2010) textual, using “strategies of citation [to] pro- What is evident in this statement is that the concept of the documentary was used to generate the by Zinny / Maidagan in the foyer and upper level of voke an awareness of gaps in our reading / documentary surpasses the evidentiary, “near-documentary” a term coined by the Canadian Haus der Kulturen der Welt. understanding of history and the contempo- the authentic artifactual moment, it is beyond artist Jeff Wall, and which represents the foundational “On Semaan: A Non-Vengeful Native” (text, 2010) concept that underpin the compositional attitude of his by Walid Sadek is distributed throughout the Haus der rary moment. By re-presenting previously the event and not coded in representation. large-format, backlit lightboxes. Kulturen der Welt. (June 2 to 6) published documents, journalism, theory, The theme of civil war, and its entanglement 5 Two images in this project, Robert Capa’s seminal

14 15 MISSING IMAGE #1 called him a “bogeyman of editors”. Like Three TV films by Michael many of his colleagues of the time, he had entered film through the back door. Initially Mrakitsch and strategies for he had studied painting at the Geneva Uni- reenvisioning them versity of Art and Design and was part of Florian Schneider the Dieter Roth/Daniel Spoerri circle in Berne. In the late 1950s he moved to Paris for an extended stay, where he worked as a He had a reputation as the “Dostoyevsky of trainee on nouvelle vague films and met documentaries” (Süddeutsche Zeitung) and Alain Resnais. as “the most stubborn, obsessed documentary filmmaker in German TV” (Der Spiegel). Mrakitsch was a lone wolf, yet he always His films were celebrated as a “triumph of the worked on comparatively well equipped TV documentary over fiction”, yet even twenty productions rather than as an independent. years ago they had seemed to “disappear He was not prepared to comply with their in the bargain basement of a fallen me- regimentation and insisted on maximum Djibouti oder Die Gewehre sind nicht geladen, nur nachts. Michael Mrakitsch, 1975 dium” (Die Zeit). artistic freedom, a condition which the bureau- crats at the TV stations conceded only Very few people have heard of the filmmak- reluctantly or following nerve-wrecking con- er, actor and painter Michael Mrakitsch flicts. More than anything else, he never nowadays. He was born in Nuremberg and made it easy for himself. made his home in Switzerland, dying last March after a long illness. He worked for a The ‘difficult’ label has also been applied number of German TV stations from the because it is not exactly easy to identify early 1960s to the 1990s, and his films are the significance of Mrakitsch’s films from a among the most exciting, challenging and contemporary perspective. His credo was thought-provoking works from a short era that “debate in society must be held in the of film and TV history which, although it dominant medium”. It was a short-lived has not entirely disappeared, has certainly battle that was doomed to failure from the been buried in the stations’ archives. outset, but precisely for that reason it has offered insights into a situation where TV Mrakitsch’s works comprise a number of major has lost its dominance yet its former influ- political documentaries, essay films, portraits ence is retained in the formats of new media. of artists and several feature films, all of which have been labelled ‘difficult’ for at least Mrakitsch’s films deal with the impossibility three reasons. of making a film, at least in the conventional sense. The nature of this impossibility Firstly, Mrakitsch devoted himself almost varies from case to case and must be in- exclusively to comparatively ‘weighty’ subjects. vestigated each time anew. Everything Although his filmmaking career began with that can be seen or heard happens despite a series of shorts for the satirical Swiss TV these and several other circumstances. programme Freitagsmagazin, he transferred to the documentaries department of Süd- Each film made by Mrakitschs is an exhibit deutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart following testifying not to a necessarily distorted a dispute with his superior. Later he worked reality but to a complex, serious and abso- primarily for Radio Bremen and Saarlän- lutely uncynical attempt to gain insight from discher Rundfunk. The films he produced the failure of strategies for visualisation. with editors such as Klaus Simon and This insight goes far beyond documenting Elmar Hügler gradually became longer, re- a false reality and can therefore only peatedly dealing with no less a theme than persist in making clear what is truly false. “violence sanctioned by society”. *** Djibouti oder Die Gewehre sind nicht geladen, Michael Mrakitsch was regarded as an incon- nur nachts (Djibouti or the guns aren’t load- venience from the very beginning. Some ed, only by night) is the unintentional and 17 Schalom oder Wir haben nichts zu verlieren Michael Mrakitsch, 1983 largely reluctant dissection of the more or absence of any figure of identification, the quences, the film can only produce some- The film’s theme, as with Djibouti, is sedat- less obviously repulsive nature of a colonial unspoken hope of liberation movements thing approaching the truth about social ing the desire for self-determination, the regime which has long outlived itself while can be sensed, soon transforming these relationships if this defeat is successful. stealthy extinguishing of subjectivity via assiduously presenting its post-colonial snapshots of a travelling German documentary *** medicated intoxication, and safe custody continued existence far beyond the present maker into waste paper or a footnote to a Drinnen, das ist wie draußen, nur anders. and displacement for the living dead, all at- day. newspaper review. It was subsequently said Protokolle aus einer psychiatrischen Anstalt titudes which seemingly exclude any hope that the leader of the independence move- (“Irrenhausprotokolle”) (Inside, that’s like of escape. Conversations between doc- Mrakitsch travelled to Djibouti with a small ment who later became president saw the outside, just different: A record of a psychiatric tors and patients reveal how any hope of TV crew to make a film about German mer- film, and that the director of the TV station clinic – Madhouse Minutes) is set in a improvement gradually fades away. And yet cenaries in the foreign legion. It was prob- in decolonised Djibouti wanted to broad- psychiatric institution near Düren (half way the patients are not victims, because they ably intended to be an exposé observing the cast it. But not until Djibouti was really lib- between Cologne and Aachen) which was seem to be aware of the futility of their situ- crude banality of everyday German culture, erated. regarded as progressive in the 1970s. It ations to a disturbing degree. The longer a genre characterised by the ‘Stuttgart school’ was probably the first time that patients the image of their torpor remains, the more of Roman Brodmann, Wilhelm Bittorf, Elmar The terrible thing is that liberation never hap- in a psychiatric clinic had been allowed to they retain a positively exceptional dignity. Hügler and Peter Nestler in the 1960s and pened, or is still waiting to happen. When speak on German TV, but they were mostly early 1970s; Mrakitsch was dismayed to be Mrakitsch returned to Djibouti in 1991, during seen behind a window which made the Yet the patients’ relative aplomb has a included as one of its proponents. However, the first Gulf War, everything had changed screen appear strangely doubled. It is the paralysing effect on us, the audience, for our the protagonist suddenly refused to appear in order to stay the same as it had been reflection of a society which is capable of assumed normality is visibly exposed as on camera once shooting started. before the nominal independ-ence from the sedating those who are no longer able to an artificial construct or, even worse, as a Mrakitsch started filming regardless – fragments French colonial masters. By contrast with reproduce their labour as a product. lucky coincidence. “A society of autono- of images that should not even really be the first Djibouti film, where the colonial per- mous processes threatens, a society as a considered, opportunities that happen by spective remained unbearably inaccessible The film abstains from any form of investi- total institution where chance alone is a chance after all, referring to a project that and was not broached in formal terms, in gation, and clearly does not aim to expose sign of life.” has already failed, and long journeys to the the second film the local protagonists were inhuman conditions, rehabilitate patients *** surface of a reality that cannot be com- granted a voice – poets and authors who who had been falsely hospitalised or ac- Schalom oder Wir haben nichts zu verlieren prehended with any haste. talk about “what is happening now” in their cuse the management of neglect. Instead, (Shalom or We have nothing to lose) is sheer “invented, paralysed land”. This time there the static camera repeatedly and without horror; it is shock at the reality of war, depic- The film that was created in the editing suite is no trace of empathy, or even sympathy, any intervention by the filmmaker records tions of which have now become a staple brought to account the visual repertoire of which are otherwise characteristic of both the regulations according to which ritual component of virtually every news foreign reportage which dominates to this documentaries on the third world. The film the institution functions and the results of programme. The film amasses impressions day – third world misery on display in hastily concludes: “We observe each other, fleet- this system being implemented. of encounters which must have been so cobbled together images which are capable ingly or with an attentive casualness, but we disturbing at the time that the broadcaster of wresting a touch of exotic beauty from hardly exchange a word. A few times we “The new institutional patient is a person accompanied the showing with a specially even the most blatant forms of poverty and catch each other’s eye.” whose presence in society threatens to be produced guide to the history of the perse- exploitation. The film is overlaid with a more disadvantageous than advantageous, cution of Jews and the Shoah. commentary that deals with the oppressive Mrakitsch might be one of the few documentary an individual whose socio-economic helplessness of its creator in escaping the makers who have consistently resisted the relevance has become questionable and In 1982 Mrakitsch visited a group of settlers colonial – or even post-colonial – exploitative temptation of including victims in their films should be evaluated.” Mrakitsch’s off-screen in the West Bank who were devotees of and dependent structure, if only symbol- – neither for their own sakes, nor to choose commentary is restricted to essential infor- the movement Gush Emunim (‘Bloc of the ically, in order to complete the appropriate a supposedly more harmless or more effi- mation and is delivered in a comparatively Faithful’), which advocated a Greater Israel. film for the subject matter. cient way to expose the schemes of those dry tone. “Fences, barbed wire, spotlights. I tried in responsible for the situation, and also not to vain to block out associations of the ghetto The film is certainly not about the real situation hold up a mirror to the audience, who can be “The people who are dumped there are unreli- and concentration camps. It was painfully in Djibouti. The city is an invention, as the reassured that they are benevolent, well- able, difficult, irritating, disturbing, unpredict- incomprehensible to me how young Jews, title of the second film nearly twenty years meaning observers. able, but not actually ill. Illness itself plays of all people, could spend their lives behind later indicates, and each attempt to engage a secondary role in the institution.” This rather a military entanglement. Were they too young with the perfidy of the colonial reality must The reality of the film image does not claim unspectacular conclusion is meticulously already to be alarmed?” asked Mrakitsch inevitably end in complicity with the regime. to produce – or even accurately represent – documented and flawlessly argued. After all, upon seeing the paramilitary settlement. The only way to escape it is by numbing all a link to how things really are. The image the administration of every-day misery is The film depicts the process of capturing land the senses. documents the filmmaker’s defeat against more harrowing than any scandal: “Making and carving up the Palestinian settlements, a superior force that must be combated in distress merely bearable is essentially the which had only just commenced in a system- So what should be done? Mrakitsch did not some other way, in a battle that must take same thing as humanising the inhumane.” atic manner while the film was being shot. ask that question once, let alone suggest an place somewhere else. In a different context At that time the goal of Israel’s colonisation answer. Between the images and in the and with somewhat unpredictable conse- policy was still wage labour. Yet as the

18 19 Palestinians in the West Bank knew full well: a materialism that is still astonishingly refresh- and generated the conditions with which Missing Image #1 “They’re taking our land, what will stop them ing and undogmatic. Even if the films may they are so closely linked. From a modern Screenings with introductions by Florian Schneider from taking our work?” initially give a different impression, they are perspective at least, they represent exactly Djibouti oder Die Gewehre sind nicht geladen, nur nachts neither about bringing the world into one’s the opposite of what TV is or claims to be, (Djibouti or the guns aren’t loaded, only by night), D: Michael Mrakitsch then travelled to the Palestinian living room nor are they concerned with while in return issuing a stern rebuke about Mrakitsch GER 1975, 53 min, OmE. Djibouti, Wiederbegeg- nung mit einer Erfindung 1973/1991 (Djibouti, Revisiting refugee camp Burdsche el-Schimali. Many lecturing people from up high. Mrakitsch’s what TV could indeed achieve but has long an Invention) D: Michael Mrakitsch, GER 1991, 60 min, OmE. of those he met had only a few years previ- works mark the imaginary vanishing point of ceased to even dare imagine possible. Wednesday, June 2, 10 pm ously survived the siege of Tel al-Zaatar an enlightened bourgeoisie which has Schalom oder wir haben nichts zu verlieren (Shalom or We (the blockade of a refugee camp in Beirut by long since ceased to exist because it either The aim of showing and seeing these films Have Nothing to Lose), D: Michael Mrakitsch, GER 1983, Christian militia which ended in a massacre made itself of use to fascism or was de- once more after so many years is to con- 130 min, OmE. Thursday, June 3, 12 noon in 1976) and had sought refuge there. stroyed by it. It is a kind of intelligentsia, lit- duct an experiment with a genuinely open Shortly before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon erally an informed bourgeoisie, because outcome. Bad films always look the same. Drinnen, das ist wie draußen, nur anders. Protokolle aus einer psychiatrischen Anstalt (Inside, that’s like outside, just and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila they forming an untoward opinion goes hand in hand Good films, by contrast, have a different effect different. Madhouse minutes,), D: Michael Mrakitsch, GER were once more at risk of being surrounded with reconquering one’s own voice, one that each time they are viewed. 1977, 97 min, OmE. Sunday, June 6, 2.30 pm and under rocket attack. exists primarily because it would be able to Die Flüchtigkeit des Dokumentarischen. (The Fleeting- intervene in a situation rather than merely ness of the Documentary) Florian Schneider talks to Rick The film takes place in “a kind of gruelling accurately reflecting that situation. Prelinger, founder of the Prelinger Archives. Sunday, June 6, timelessness”. The confusion of war is re- 4.30 pm lated in long interviews from the perspective This attitude could well characterise a whole Films listed as OmE are shown in the original version with of the Palestinian refugees, just as the last generation of West German intellectuals English subtitles. autonomous structures of the Palestinian who experienced fascism and the war as liberation movement are being destroyed, children, who wanted to make a radical having come closer than ever before to setting break but for whom neither dogmatic one- up its own state. With the Israeli annexation party socialism nor the romantic impetu- policy, Christian militia, and Syrian rockets, ousness of the Oedipal revolutions in the 1960s the film is a desperate attempt to counter war was an option. Fuelled by the urgent need propaganda, exhortations to keep going, for the ‘re-education’ of everyday West and deliberate misinformation with the aid of German culture and despite all the dire a kind of historiography from below. At a predictions, they started using TV as a new length of 135 minutes in a prime-time slot, it medium to provoke the alienated, false was interrupted only by the evening news. consciousness with a level of intellectualism which was uniquely resistant to the “We catch ourselves shooting strange pictures efficient thinking of unbridled industrial that have nothing to do with our central capitalism and the brutality of its institution- theme. Images of a shameless, almost ob- alised after-effects. scene lack of history.” The documentary is forced to capitulate to the irrevocable situ- There are many reasons why this strategy ation created by the military. The film crew did not really work, and its failure is hardly has returned to the bunker at the end of the surprising from a modern perspective. film because the Israeli military has begun Resignation and a retreat to aesthetics in to bomb the refugee camp. the face of the emerging post-industrial *** entertainment industry were more or less “I represent the Enlightenment, but I no longer the inevitable consequences of an ap- believe in it,” said Mrakitsch once. He proach that on the one hand had to act in claimed to be working in the tradition of an uncompromising manner and on the other 1960s French film essayists, who he valued was completely riven. for their literary approach and particularly This mini retrospective of three TV films by because they did not “betray their objective Michael Mrakitsch and the three projects to cinematography”. that succeeded them is not merely a tribute to an equally important yet long-forgotten He saw documentaries as a conscious rejection protagonist of West German documentary of art, and in this respect an eminently filmmaking. The films are possibly being political act and an inevitable shift towards shown for the first time outside a TV setting, a more social attitude which accompanies away from the medium that produced them

20 21 Angela Melitopoulos, Möglichkeitsraum (The Blast of the Possible). Photo: Carmelle Rubinstein. Traversing the Memory archive of feminism and performance art, in with this. It is his aim to discuss this first files which could be accessed by telephone, Force Field other words, about a form that can be transition of cybernetic systems as an integral containing tales of people living in borderline archived in assorted forms – as a video re- part of governmental power. He will take a situations or who had transgressed bound- Angela Melitopoulos talks to cording or a reenactment, something that propagandistic documentary such as Frank aries. Someone who has been living in Bert Rebhandl about her Project a number of women artists have been doing Capra’s Why We Fight as his starting point, Kreuzberg illegally since 1993, for example. “Möglichkeitsraum (The Blast of since the early 1970s. Knaup and Stammer supplemented by documents about the A Palestinian who crossed the border, landed the Possible)” looked up this form of reenactment because “kitchen debate” between Khrushchev and at Dubai airport and then effectively disap- we wanted to see what significance it had Nixon in the late 1950s. The second plateau peared – all that remains is a thin voice as he for an archive. In a screen performance every- will deal with the 1970s, when video cameras phones the lawyer of an NGO; apart from Ms Melitopoulos, your project at the thing is interconnected, so you don’t just see had become widely accessible as a way of that this person has completely gone. There BERLIN DOCUMENTARY FORUM 1 is things one after the other. This will enable producing subjectivity and forming the self. were also the sounds of protest from a No called “Möglichkeitsraum”. What is it us to see how films offer a different reading Holmes will attempt to integrate the element Borders Camp in Greece or a Filipina migrant about? in another era and context. of “filming oneself” into this relationship. from Cyprus, one of hundreds of thousands I’ll be working with Stefanie Schulte Strathaus Forms of family therapy that relied on video of domestic workers who have decided to It’s essentially more about producing formats from Berlin’s Arsenal cinema for the second had a deterritorialising or liberating effect, leave their home countries and offer their than projects. It is a sort of montage per- slot. Arsenal represents this concept of the which, according to Holmes, strongly influ- services somewhere else in the world. formed live on stage. The format calls for a vitality of film. Each screening is an event, enced video as an art form in general and slot of between ninety minutes and two and each audience ‘feeds’ the archive. There which in his opinion formed part of video art. What role does the archive play in this hours, and several different archives are in- is a link between the singularity of the event A third plateau will concentrate on networks, “Möglichkeitsraum”? volved in total, but I only work with one other (a showing or a festival) and the feedback to something that was considered at a theoreti- person each time. In each of the three the work in the archive. We’re going to try to cal level in the 1970s but was only really This project took Cyprus as its starting point, events we just deal with one specific archive, shed light on this connection by taking three put into practice in the 1990s. It is a network where the negotiations between North and and together we work out his or her attitude to examples from the past. In 1973 Helke that in turn has become the object of a South on the divided island were exemplified that archive. I call it “The Blast of the Possible” Sander and Claudia von Aleman organised society of control. We will present various through archives. Abandoned rooms and because whatever is contained in the archive the Frauenfilmseminar, the first event ever American activist projects, some of which ownership disputes originating from the “eth- at a virtual level is updated in the live perfor- devoted to women and film in Germany. It are already familiar, for instance Brian Springer, nic cleansing” in 1974 will be investigated, mance or show. This idea is closely linked was where the link between heteronorm- who distributed satellite feeds of political although the changes cannot actually be to Bergson’s concept of the virtual and the ativity and labour economics was established, programmes where you could see politicians completely reconstructed because of the ar- actual time regime, which has been a frequent and where many of the principles were worked just before they went on air. For the final chives themselves. Following a change of aspect of my work over the years. Other out for what is now called biopolitics. It’s and fourth plateau we’re also investigating government, new ownership laws were intro- works of mine have also followed the idea that unbelievable how up-to-date these films still how political movements are currently reject- duced which resulted in a non-resolvable montage will return to what it was before are today, also in terms of precarity generally. ing means of communication – Tikkun, for political border, one that cannot be recon- the advent of the blockbuster, namely on the Everything the participants discussed in 1973 example, is one of the groups calling for all structed in any detail. “Möglichkeitsraum” stage, yet still making some reference to is still relevant – the penetration of private mobile phones to be thrown away in order presents images of a town where overgrown cinema. The theatrical stage and the cinema space by patriarchal hierarchies and of pub- to encourage other forms of communication. plants are taking over, which is a further auditorium are brought together to form a lic space by the gaze, as well as underpay- It’s all about forms of community, space, option for utilising the space. I’m talking here space for montage. During each individual ing and refusing to recognise reproductive locality. I’ll definitely be integrating a number of a “blast of the possible”, an ex- or implo- slot this other person and myself consult work. Looking at what happened in 1973 is of ideas on the themes of migration and sion of whatever is feasible. When people their archive. The result is a performance on like taking a cross-section through time with mnemotechnology, because the whole idea believed in reunification there was a surge of screen for two hours. Initially, there will al- the aim of understanding and investigating of “Möglichkeitsraum” was linked to those energy in that direction. Now the mood is ways be a kind of double screen, which allows which conclusions can be drawn about sys- from the start. more pessimistic, and it’s necessary to take a relationship to develop between two im- tems of government. action. ages. There will also be a sound-mix and a There are previous versions of this project, spoken component, so we’ll be making use And what about the third archive, pre- also entitled “Möglichkeitsraum”. How is “Möglichkeitsraum” related to and of every opportunity to make the images sented by Brian Holmes? determined by the past? dynamic. It’s a series which I would characterise as Brian and myself have both done work on format development. The first version of Essentially, the idea that a narrative using Who are the people you are working Félix Guattari in the past. He will be giving a “Möglichkeitsraum” consisted of photographs moving or historical images is somehow with? performative lecture on developments in taken by the UN of Varosha, a ghost town connected with memory, with thinking about media activism and cybernetics. This lecture on Cyprus. They were displayed in a derelict time, is inherent to my work. Thinking about Firstly there’s Bettina Knaup, who put together will contain four plateaus, starting from the area of Kreuzberg where part of the Berlin time is characterised by automated or non- the re.act.feminism exhibition last year with end of World War II. First Holmes will ad- Wall once stood. Each photographic image automated processes. Automated ones are Beatrice E. Stammer at the Berlin Akademie dress the transition to the idea of cybernet- was mounted such that it created a montage liberating because you don’t have to think der Künste. This theme is continued in an ics and how the US government has dealt in the public domain. There were also audio about them. There are also processes for

24 25 which you have to make a decision and es- Mnemotechniques are frequently connected processes no longer relate solely to migra- Möglichkeitsraum (The Blast of the Possible) tablish a kind of relationship, which in turn to objects. It is not just my intention to de- tion, but to mobility as well. Brian Holmes The Life of a Film Archive. A screen performance by establishes new levels of language. These scribe images as objects, because I am one has elaborated on the significance that film- Angela Melitopoulos and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus. processes taking place in someone’s mem- of those people who describe objects as ing oneself had in terms of subjectivity in the With clippings of films by Claudia von Alemann (Es kommt ory – in their body memory as well – can be subjects, too. There’s a kind of physical con- 1970s, and I believe migration is very similar. darauf an, sie zu verändern, 1972/73), Pauline Boudry und Renate Lorenz (Charming for the Revolution, easily related to a particular form of video or solidation in every image. Each has its own If you take a utopian perspective, it turns 2009), Beate Rathke (Toss it, Baby, 2007), Helke Sander film art work. That’s what Deleuze did, and reference to memory which is conceived as every migrant into a filmmaker, into a repre- (Subjektitüde, 1966 and Eine Prämie für Irene, 1971), what we did too on video philosophy with a vector, instead of thinking about an image sentative of history at a micro-level, into a Jack Smith, Joyce Wieland (Handtinting, 1967) and the new women‘s movement of the years 1967–1973 et al. Maurizio Lazzarato. Montage is about form- as representation. What does an image messenger who knows how to shed a differ- Guests: Claudia von Alemann, Karola Gramann, Nanna ing time, a continuum, fractures – how do represent? Which world? Does it represent ent light on all this geopolitical rubbish being Heidenreich, Heide Schlüpmann and Marc Siegel. you conceive the end of a continuum? How anything at all, or does an image serve some produced by the mass media. That’s why Thursday, June 3, 10 pm can you think about the transition from one other purpose, something like the discovery of excluding migrants from becoming citizens Extra-disciplinary Art Practices and Media Activism. continuum to another? How do you ap- a force vector, a direction of force, or a for- and acquiring legal status, preventing them A screen performance by Angela Melitopoulos and proach narratives that do not subject them- mation, in which the thought formulates a di- from becoming people who can tell stories, Brian Holmes. With clippings of films and sound recordings selves to the dictates of a fake continuum, rection towards something else, just as a is so crucial for the established order. Not by Antonin Artaud (Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu, 1948), Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman and Peter but rather accept and describe transitions word refers to something else in the sphere only do migrants relate desubjectivised tales Gessner (Finally Got the News, 1970), Frank Capra (War from one continuum to another? That leads to of communication. The issue then is not of border crossings – are you allowed in or Comes to America, 1945), Harun Farocki (Die Schöpfer a kind of thinking which not only serves the renewing a boundary between myself and the do you have to stay out? – they are ambas- der Einkaufswelten, 2001), Paul Garrin (Man with the Video Camera, 1989), Arthur Ginsberg und Video Free potential of establishing a super-continuum, but external world – what is internal and external sadors for post-colonial conditions and a America (The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd, 1972- also attempts to present fractures as an to me – but the communication between the different set of spatial relationships, which 1975), Raphäel Grisey & Bouba Touré (58 Rue Trous- inherent aspect of what will actually be pos- memory force-field of the image and my are suppressed for political reasons. And seau, Paris, 2008), Julie Gustafson (The Politics of Inti- sible, what is heterogeneous, and what mental capacity to relate this force-field to this is pure biopolitics. macy, 1974), IBM (SAGE Film, 1957), Doug Hall (This is the Truth, 1982), Joan produces a different form which is not often my memory. It is a field that flows or vi- Jonas (Vertical Roll, 1972), the Nixon-Khrushchev “Kitchen permitted because it does not tell the narra- brates, where nothing is depicted that could What role might consulting archives play Debate” (1959), The Living Theater (Paradise Now, tive we are used to. be a fixed or objective world. All these flows generally for political subjectification? 1969), Robert Morris (Exchange, 1973), Antonio Munta- das und Marshall Reese (Political Advertisement, are moving at different speeds and colliding 1960/1984), Paper Tiger TV (Ddtv_58_global_dissent, How important is Bergson’s philosophy with each other. These are the affective I think that Assemblages, a film I did recently 1991), Richard Serra and Carlotta Fay Schoolman for you in this respect? experiences we can sense, even physically. with Maurizio Lazzarato about Félix Guattari, (Television Delivers People, 1973), Brian Springer (Spin, 1995), Subcomandante Marcos addresses “Free Media” is interesting because we did some of our work (1996) et al. Friday, June 4, 12 noon Bergson sees both levels – actualising and If we want to relate this to migration, with archives that have their origins in cine- virtualising – as central, but I’m just as inter- what role do images play in that respect? ma vérité. Fernand Deligny, for example, Feminism and Performance Art. A screen performance by Angela Melitopoulos and Bettina Knaup. With ested in Foucault, who claims that it is possible As a replacement for the experience of filmed long sequences of working with mentally clippings of films by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Mouth to to establish what is possible or real, for in- loss or mobilising identity? ill people. He reached a whole different level Mouth, 1975), Laura Cottingham (Not For Sale, 1998), stance, in an image or archive. Any action that with this kind of mapping which allowed him VALIE EXPORT (Hauchtext: Liebesgedicht, 1970-73 und can be remembered is virtual. Actualising Migration, as I have experienced it, creates a to make contact with autistic children. These Hyperbulie, 1973), Sanja Ivekovic (Instructions No1, 1976), Françoise Janicot (Encoconnage, 1972), Ana Men- refers to what can be achieved in a concrete relationship between two locations – an eternal are very different worlds which can only dieta (Alma Silueta en Fuego (Soul Silhouette on Fire)), relationship of strength – not everything that back and forth which is actually a kind of come into contact with each other by using Untitled (Flower Person), 1975), Linda Montano (Mitchell’s is virtual is always access-ible. All pasts exist freedom, because the structures are not non-rational, non-verbal techniques such Death, 1977), Ulrike Rosenbach (Glauben Sie nicht, dass ich eine Amazone bin, 1975), Martha Rosler (Vital simultaneously for Bergson, with the actuali- family-based. Photography is just an everyday as touch. Other physical forces besides one’s Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, 1977), Pauline sation functioning as the densest moment of process within this freedom. My parents own – the filmed image, for example – can Boudry and Renate Lorenz (n.o.body, 2008), Andrea Sae- all the different pasts. The present time is always took photos, as well; migration has possibly be felt most strongly in the montage mann & Katrin Grögel (Performance Saga Interviews, 2007-2008), Carolee Schneemann (Meat Joy, 1964), Ga- also differentiated by nothing more significant generated enormous numbers of images, sequence. When these things enter our con- briele Stötzer (Trisal, 1986), Mierle Ladermann Ukeles than its density. The past is a time tunnel and not just in my family. I think it is generally sciousness we can create a constitutive level (Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979) und Faith Wilding confronting a kind of contemporary expanse. true, primarily as a way of showing where for ourselves. I think the battle is no longer (Waiting, 1972) et al. Saturday, June 5, 2.30 pm In this sense, you perform the act to arrive at you were and how you lived. But then you merely taking place as rational language, but this freedom. You have an archive, a time- realise that there’s a whole different level of also at an affective, biopolit-ical level. Thus, line, you try to come up with a concept and taking pictures, at which point you start taking the level of media which we are confronted not just implement certain scenarios. them differently, and more than that, you with while we simultaneously produce it is start seeing the world differently. You start also a blast of the possible where personal Mnemotechniques have at least two as- seeing the world from the perspective of archives play a major role. pects, one that is more somatic and one creating images, which generates a com- that is more technical. How does that pletely new process – analysing the world, work in your opinion? for example, and noticing that the world is so much richer than imagined. Nowadays these

26 27 Tout est dans le montage 32-minute film commissioned in 1955 by the Notes on “Documentary French World War II history committee (Comité d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Moments: Renaissance” mondiale) is the first fictionalised docu- Eyal Sivan mentary representation of the Nazi concen- tration and extermination system.

On a chilly spring night of April 1961, the As only one of the four cameras installed in Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann gets taken out the Jerusalem court could be recorded from his high security prison in order to at- on videotape, Hurwitz decided to trace the tend an extraordinary unofficial and discrete images of the spectator. He focused on session of the Jerusalem district court Adolf Eichmann’s initial discovery of the im- where his trial has been taking place since ages rather than on the screened image, the month of March. Following a request privileging the projection rather than the from Eichmann’s lawyer the court convenes screening. The counter shots, the screened to preview the films which the attorney film footage, create (in real time) a confron- general wished to show during the next day’s tation between the Nazi’s gaze and the public session. consequences of his deeds. Eichmann the spectator becomes a witness. Wearing a prison uniform and wool pullover, the defendant Adolf Eichmann enters the Almost five decades later, Resnais’ friend dark court and takes his place in the glass and colleague, the French image-maker booth opposite the cinema screen. The Chris Marker, downloads Leo T. Hurwitz’s mute scene of the man in his sixties, wear- night screening shots from the Eichmann ing a homey outfit, staring with curiosity at trial video archives available on the Internet. the images appearing on the screen in Chris Marker, Resnais’ assistant on Nuit et front of him, was secretly recorded on video. Brouillard, synchronises Hurwitz’s shots In fact, Leo T. Hurwitz – the American with those of Resnais’ film. Re-placing the director in charge of the Eichmann trial multi- missing sound and changing the screened camera recordings – violated the legal images with the equivalent scenes from Re- framework of the court’s video recordings nais’ Night and Fog, Marker composes and documented the perpetrator Adolf Henchman Glance. Horwitz’s unauthorised Eichmann as an ordinary silent cinema images of Eichmann watching Resnais’ spectator in his intimacy. Night and Fog, edited by Marker together with the original film’s sound and colour Filmed by the Allied forces during the liber- shots are an invitation to experience the ation of the Nazi concentration and death destabilising effect of watching the horror camps, the images on the screen were to- with the perpetrator, and through his eyes. tally new to Eichmann. Hurwitz’s mute The unsigned 32-minute documentary scene of Adolf Eichmann, the documentary composition Henchman Glance is a para- cinema spectator, tells the initial encounter digmatic representation of the documen- between the criminal and the image of the tary practice question. The observation of crime. In addition to these images previ- the perpetrator, the visual interrogation of ously screened at the 1945–46 Nuremberg the witness of the political evil, the investiga- Trials (which since then have gained an tion of power and authority, marked the iconic status of the Holocaust representa- post-World War II documentary cinema. tion) the Israeli attorney general chose to screen to the defendant and the court the Paradoxically, immediately after the end of short documentary film Nuit et Brouillard the war, documentary moving images (Night and Fog). Produced ten years after seemed to gain both the status of witness the Nuremberg Trials by the French film- and proof. During the Nuremberg Military maker Alain Resnais, edited with a text by Tribunals (NMT) staged in Germany in French author Jean Cayrol and a score by 1945, documentary images were mobilised German composer Hanns Eisler, Resnais’ in order to deliver their truth testimony, to

29 Les Statues Meurent Aussi (FR 1953) - Chris Marker, Alain Resnais. show reality. Staged in order to give an image the oral history of the post Euro-Genocide has absolutely no meaning as far as I’m Documentary Moments: Renaissance to the Nazi horror, the cinema screening in (documentary) image. Four takes depict concerned.” A conversation between Fred- Take 1 – Towards Night and Fog: Alain Resnais. court (becoming simultaneously a cinematic the reinvention of documentary language erick Wiseman and film historian Stella Thursday June 3, 7 pm object) is a turning point for documentary and the exploration of its potentialities in Bruzzi is followed by a screening of his film cinema interrogation. the years that followed the war. Primate (1974), which presents a scientific Take 2 – Memory of the Future: Edgar Morin. Friday June 4, 6 pm An historical era during which, being a favou- study of the physical and mental develop- A generation of young filmmakers born be- rite tool of power, the documentary images ment of primates, as conducted at Yerkes Take 3 – ‘Direct ’, ‘Truth’ and other Myths: Frederick tween the 1920s and 1930s and having were disseminated as a weapon among others. Primate Research Center. Wiseman. Saturday June 5, 4.30 pm grown up through the war would gradually and by various modes domesticate the “Take 1” delineates a path toward the seminal “Take 4” is called “Wartime/War crime”. Take 4 – Wartime/War crime: Marcel Ophuls. documentary cinema in order to interrogate Nuit et Brouillard. Several short documen- Filmmaker Marcel Ophuls uses the docu- Sunday June 6, 6 pm the documentary practice’s potential to tary films produced in the 1940s and 1950s mentary interview and montage to review produce truth. will be screened: Guernica (1950) and Les and re-edit historical narration, subverting Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die, the hegemony of authority and its propaganda Suspicious of power and inhibited by the 1953) as well as Henchman Glance with image. His epic oeuvre – both in scope urgent interrogation of authority, challenged commentaries by cultural historians Adrian and in length – is a landmark of the critical by public habits of spectatorship under the Rifkin and Marie-José Mondzain. historical essay. By introducing the film- shadow of propaganda and the cold war, maker as an actor of history, “where (my) the post-World War II documentary practi- “Take 2” of “Documentary Moments” is called point of view and creativity come in”, he re- tioners forged new modalities of produc- “Memory of the Future”. It consists of a defines the notion of resistance. A conversa- tion and distribution, and witnessed the ar- revisit of the film Chronicle of a Summer (1961). tion between Marcel Ophuls and Eyal Sivan rival of the TV channels as influential actors. Directed by anthropologist Jean Rouch is followed by a screening of the film The The twenty years that followed the end of and sociologist Edgar Morin, Chronicle of a Memory of Justice (1973-1976). The film uses World War II led to major aesthetical-political Summer builds truth through constructed or Telford Taylor’s book Nuremberg and Vietnam: debates and experimentation around cine- almost fictional situations. When released, it An American Tragedy as a point of departure ma, documentary practice and language – provoked heated debates on the relationship in exploring wartime atrocities and individual two decades which became the backdrop between cinema, reality and truth. In 2007, versus collective responsibility. for a process of reinvention and emancipation artists Ayreen Anastas, François Bucher of the documentary moving image. It was a and Rene Gabri unearthed an interview with practice expropriated from ruling power and Edgar Morin, in which he mentioned a re-appropriated by independent images- cache of original rushes. With the assistance makers in order to achieve its re-politicisa- of Françoise Foucault, a former collaborator of tion and apotheosis during the late 1960s Rouch, they succeeded in finding nearly and 1970s. everything that had not been included in the final edit. Shots from the original 16 mm In order to tell the story of the regaining of rushes of Chronicle of a Summer and a confidence in the documentary image after discussion with Edgar Morin will make up World War II, this montage is seeking to the core of this programme. narrate and review some landmarks of the practice’s history(ies). “Documentary Mo- “Take 3” is entitled “’Direct’, ‘Truth’ and other ments” is a montage born from the desire Myths”. Independent producer and filmmaker to observe, to grasp, to historicise and Frederick Wiseman’s unswerving interest is then re-view the documentary gesture. It is to produce direct cinema, a notion refuted by a feeling of need to elaborate on the articula- Wiseman himself. Since the mid-1960s, he tion of the documentary film practice as a has scrutinised American life and institutions, tool enabling the reading of the image – any revealing the mechanisms of administration image – as image. and hierarchy. His practice is a benchmark in the entire history of social documentary. 1946, the year when the Nuremberg trials Both a school and a genre, Wiseman’s were staged in Germany, is designated as infinitely re-qualified cinema is indispens- the year zero of documentary film practice. able in any debate on the potential of the The project “Documentary Moments: Re- documentary image to produce truth. Sig- naissance” brings together the ‘classics’ of nificantly, Wiseman declares, “Cinema documentary cinema in an attempt to write verité is just a pompous French term that

30 31 TRANSCRIPTIONS – who bears an almost divine gift, a ‘genius’, too; depending on our mood certain influences Fate is ours to make, or so we are told. And On Authorship, Authority and and creates from his/her own mind alone, will be triggered and others won’t. [RS] as much as the past seems to be something would somehow neglect the idea of someone Yet the authorship of something implies an immutable, History can always be reviewed and Authenticity who goes along with the constant negotia- expression of the self, a stance that places unveiled in a fashion that echoes our rela- Eduardo Thomas tion of ideas that find their way across time... the individual within tradition. In order to find tionship with the future. Alternate readings of or as John Donne puts it: its voice, the author draws from tradition, but the past through methodical examination “All mankind is of one author, and is one vol- in so doing expresses a vision that could be open anew subjective lectures and interpre- What follows is a text based on ideas brewed ume; when one man dies, one chapter is regarded as unique. Would this contradict tations of what was. collectively. It has been written on the road, not torn out of the book, but translated into what has been said above? A sense of authentic search is what we grasp taking advantage of the chance to meet people a better language; and every chapter must There is no such thing as total parting from from Lee Anne Schmitt’s film California Com- along the way. The spirit that motivates it is a be so translated. . . .” tradition, it all is the same language, however, pany Town, in which a careful, almost obses- strong belief in idleness as a method to find In that sense authorship holds a sense of discourses are never the same. [LMO] sive recall on the history of townships across some truth out there, and as such it is a com- continuation, not necessarily linear, which al- No other person writes like I do, that is be- that western state places our understanding bination of fragmented ideas, associated lows for different approximations to coexist. cause I am an individual whose personal ex- of it in a different perspective. Her work here so the reader may find a way of his/her Such continuity we may very well call tradi- perience (perspective) and subjectivity will opens a sincere quest for knowledge, one that own in them. tion. remain unique compared to someone else’s. questions an empty notion of authority as it The text derives from several sources. Some “Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying That is where the validity of a position be- projects her findings into our present and of the quotes come from a series of conver- and purifying oneself of the words of others comes important in a discourse. [RS] what may lie ahead. sations with various thinkers: Luis Muñoz- but an adopting and embracing of filiations, Authorship then builds on an alchemy of ele- The knowledge that stems from the work is Oliveira (philosopher, based in Mexico City), communities, and discourses. Inspiration ments borrowed from a wider, greater the cause. [LMO] Ben Russell (filmmaker, based in Chicago), could be called inhaling the memory of an source, in order to achieve a discourse that Whether looking for self-understanding, build- whose film Let Each One Go Where He May act never experienced. Invention, it must be would allow a self to be recognised amongst ing a historical narrative, dealing with social is part of this programme, and Rafael Saavedra humbly admitted, does not consist in creating the stream of tradition. representations, or psychological and political (writer, based in Tijuana). I thank all of them out of void but out of chaos.” – [Jonathan Discourse is a social construction, to me the interpretation, the figure of the author is that for their time and kind help. Some other quotes Lethem] phenomenon within the discourse is what is of being the one who argues. The articulation come from the films included in the pro- How far aside must we push these ideas, or more interesting, the search that lies within it. of ideas exposed within a tradition will deter- gramme to be shown at the BERLIN DOCU- how much should we keep from them, in order There are no discourses alike, the way of the mine the position of the author and the scope MENTARY FORUM 1, others are borrowed to fully understand the creative process and author is the way of sincerity. [LMO] of influence of the work. in a more conventional sense from texts already the value of the author in it? “Tradition is the handing on of fire and not Authenticity is the vision of an author. [RS] published. I see the author as a cause. Invention does the worship of ashes” – [Gustav Mahler] One does one’s best to acquire true beliefs, not mean creating something out of nothing, Tradition is rich in references, information and what one says reveals what one believes. This text proposes to talk about Authorship I don’t believe one can produce anything that has to be gathered and assimilated, The idea of meeting tradition is no more than as a process of influence and tradition; to that wasn’t. One has to consider the path of dealt with and processed through the work to learn from it and recognise ourselves in it, find discuss Authority in terms of legitimacy and the author as the path of sincerity. [Luis of the author. But the value of information is useful and valuable elements to appropriate presence; and to think of Authenticity as a Muñoz-Oliveira] not enough by itself; the task of authorship and carry on. That is the task of authorship, balance between accuracy and sincerity. Tradition is a reflexive process in which the should not be reduced to the act of placing and once it has been understood, the role It is very hard to tell authorship, authenticity vision of an author has to place itself references. Fact after fact are not relevant one plays within tradition – the next step to- and authority apart when considering their re- amongst references, and pick relationships, any more as would be to highlight the links wards an understanding (of the self, or the lation to creative practice; they intertwine and complicities along the way, so we may find that run through them. That is when the as- world around us) – would be to pursue that are very close to one another. For that reason ourselves in doing so. [Rafael Saavedra] sessment of information becomes signifi- search with authenticity. the dialogue of quotations that this text repro- The author is at the end, like any other, look- cant, and when the position of the author as Authenticity linked to the ‘purity’ or ‘es- duces will sometimes do the same and link them. ing for self-understanding, and these refer- a voice that articulates a dialogue within sence’ of things makes no sense at all, to However an effort was made to keep them ences and influences, tradition, become tradition in its own ways gains weight. think of it in such way is to think of an from being understood as interchangeable. guidelines from which to draw from. The author Through finding its position amongst the array empty search, a search impossible to be Much against the notion of the author as a is never alone, that is, as he/she builds his/ of influences the author acquires the sense fulfilled. [LMO] founder, or even an ‘originator’, by contrast to her working process upon tradition. of reflection and the ability needed to con- Sincerity is an expression of inner informa- thinking of it as the rightful owner of some- I am interested in a legitimate space, a site of sciously choose a path, to actively assume a tional states, which operates in a space that thing, having ‘produced’ it by soliloquising, it presence, where the relationships of prox- series of decisions that could eventually con- is constructed by motivations to conceal and/ becomes evident to me that the strategies of imity emphasise the openness of film. I am stitute an author’s vision. or dissimulate. To achieve authenticity an ac- appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, interested in producing an experience, not To go with tradition is not to break with it, curate recount would not be enough without and collage, alongside the more overtly ac- explaining anything. [Ben Russell] but to bring it somewhere else, carry on sincerity to help us find a way to avoid deceit, knowledged process of collaboration, lay at “To see things together in respect of the that fire and take it somewhere else. In that especially to escape self-deceiving. the core of any creative process. one.” – [Plato] sense authenticity is linked to tradition; the That is where I, as a director, have to consider To consider the figure of the author as one And our mood plays a role in this process, authentic is the object in itself. [LMO] the elements I work with. I give directions to

32 33 actors, take care of a performance and follow logical impositions, we are indeed left with a of observation as still being part of the Moreira Salles] the mandate set in the title, all in order space structured only by power.” [Bernard making of the work, a process that comes to By taking a closer look at the power relation to create an experience, a film experience. Williams] be when reflection occurs. that unfolded during the shooting of Santiago, A possibility to escape the straightforward- Authority always needs to be justified. And in Do not confuse the film for what the film Moreira Salles achieves an honest position of ness of film. [Ben Russell] order for authority to sustain itself it needs shows. The experience of the film is one thing, authority through his authentic reflection on As João Moreira Salles says, in the voice of not to be imposed, but recognised. Otherwise and it is an independent experience. [BR] his own work. It is one where we recognise the his brother Fernando (narrator of his film it will constitute a barren discourse. An important distinction between fiction and lie effort made to understand what kind of “Santiago”) when reflecting on the way he Authority is allocated accordingly to who ap- should be made at this point. Fiction as an dynamics took place, unnoticed at that mo- conducted a series of interviews with the proaches the work; as the discourse is con- inventive possibility, as a theory or model that ment, between subject and documentary former butler of his family… structed, dogma must be avoided. When we allows for a critical reflection or artistic experi- filmmaker, butler and master, as the creative “Today, 13 years later, it is hard to know until talk about authority, dogma represents the ence to happen, goes beyond mere falsehood process went on. where would we have gone in search of the most serious problem to overcome. [LMO] or deceit. Fiction is a strategy that enables a When considering the creative process, author- perfect frame, the perfect line. Watching the In the work of Eileen Simpson & Ben White, coherent ordering of elements to shape a dis- ship, authenticity and authority may lie uncut material it becomes clear that all Struggle in Jerash, we get the rare opportunity course. Let’s consider for example the follow- elsewhere. Dislocated in bits and pieces all must be seen with a certain distrust.” [excerpt of sharing the comments and reflections as ing dialogue, enunciated by Thai non-actors around us, in the public sphere, as part of from Santiago, by João Moreira Salles] they spring fresh from an audience when playing the role of themselves in front of a a commonality that constitutes our unconscious An authentic work would then be a specific confronted by a film. The British duo recorded camera in what sometimes escapes being as much as the acknowledged world that kind of discourse, one in which language the comments of contemporary Jordanian read as an acted scene: surrounds us. The task of seizing this contin- (be it visual, written, spoken and so forth) is intellectuals reflecting on what they saw in a - The opposition and the government... it’s like uous flow is the core of that process. structured in such a way that it unveils the footage shot over 50 years ago. The rele- they are acting in a movie, with us as an A quotation serves as support, it should connections hidden in our everyday life, vance of recognition in order to legitimise audience. They are making a movie for us to never be taken for the final point of a dia- highlights the relationships that sustain our something becomes evident when we hear watch. They are the villain and the hero. logue. [LMO] knowledge, and sheds light on different per- such things like: - What about the election commission? spectives of understanding the world around “Look at the king’s picture… some things - The commission is just after the money. us, one that accurately describes what the never change here.” - They have no principle? author sincerely pursues. “Those mountains are now actually full with - No, not at all. Only the money. Once the author finds a way to build his/her refugee camps.” - They must at least believe in something. work, alongside tradition, in an authentic “Maybe that’s how they spoke in the 50s.” - These people have absolutely no principles. way, this work meets an audience. The gen- “She is supposed to be covering her hair [Dialogue quoted from Uruphong Raksasad’s eral idea would be to have the piece inte- now, so… things have changed, it’s nice to Agrarian Utopia] grate tradition, and carry on with the process know how things were in the past.” The implications of a non-actor reflecting on Authorship, Authority, Authenticity. Recent Docu- of influence and continuity. But the number “Obviously the lifestyle at the time was a bit the public acting of politicians raises the mentaries from Elsewhere of voices within tradition creates a need for European…” question of authority. Could this be an au- Conversation between Eduardo Thomas, Eileen Simpson clear reference. This is when a sense of “At that point the pan-Arab feeling was very thorised voice to comment on what is being and Ben White, followed by a screening of the film authority is constituted. much emphasised. Now the emphasis is represented? In this case fiction serves sincerity Struggle In Jerash, D: Eileen Simpson and Ben White, Nowadays it seems as if authority would be and accuracy far better than any other narra- UK 2009, 63 min, OV on Jordan as a separate identity, from Lebanon, Thursday, June 3, 5 pm based on popularity ratings though, a real from Syria, from Egypt… but at that point it tive strategy. It opens a space in which an joke! Because the actual sense of authority was like one pan-Arab identity.” accurate and sincere approximation to a pre- Screening of the film California Company Town, D: Lee is to have an admitted reference, a sense cise situation is made: a way to grant things Anne Schmitt, USA 2008, 76 min, OV, followed by a con- [excerpts quoted from Struggle in Jerash, versation between Eduardo Thomas and Lee Anne diminished, then, by the abuse of it. [RS] by Simpson & White] presence. Schmitt Authority roots itself in the value attached to There is no questioning of the authenticity of This is but one of the attributes allotted to Friday, June 4, 2 pm what the author expresses through his/her those comments while listening to them. And authority: a sense of verisimilitude. To ex- Screening of the film Santiago, D: João Moreira Salles, BR work. It all sums up to how carefully something it is through that transparent collective re- press something accurately occupies docu- 2007, 80 min, OmE, followed by a conversation between is said and how much the lecture of its flection that a legitimate search for under- mentary filmmakers all over, as much as the Eduardo Thomas and João Moreira Salles discourse is taken as authentic. standing is made present. concern for an artistic experience is sought. Saturday, June 5, 12 noon Thinking along this line, authority seems to Just as the process of authorship is an ex- “The way I did the interviews pushed me Conversation between Eduardo Thomas and Ben Russell, belong in the realms of opinion or advice, pression of the collectivity in which the away from him. From the start there was an followed by a screening of the film Let Each One Go depending on the amount of support rallied author is submerged, authority is a status ambiguity between us, one that explained Where He May, D: Ben Russell, USA/Suriname 2009, 135 around the piece of work, or the clout Santiago being so uncomfortable. He was not min, OmE granted by the context that hosts the work. Saturday, June 5, 9.30 pm achieved by its arguments. That is why the active role of the observer/the just my subject, and I was not just a docu- “…if the canon of works, and the methods audience, is equally relevant to a piece’s mentary filmmaker. During 5 days of shooting Screening of the film Agrarian Utopia, D: Uruphong of interpreting them, and the historical nar- legitimate validation, as much as the process I never stopped being the son of the owner Raksasad, Thailand 2009, 122 min, OmE, followed by a conversation between Eduardo Thomas and Uruphong ratives that explain those things, are all equally behind its production. One could even try of the house, and he never ceased to be our Raksasad and simultaneously denounced as ideo- to go further and speculate on the moment butler.” [excerpt from Santiago, by João Sunday, June 6, 12 noon

34 35 “I am trying to desacralise in the background of the next one who is giving complicated, because I also relate the image documentary, and what is fiction? These two some of the taboos of the testimony of his suicide. All of this taken to the period of time when this poster actually are strongly mingled. The difference between together is an attempt to take some sacred appeared, which was in 2007 – the same year a documentary and fiction is something I my society” taboos in my society and try to deal with the Hezbollah martyrs appeared, after the couldn’t name; I don’t have the answer, but I Rabih Mroué talks to Bert Rebhandl them in a human way and desacralise them. Israeli war against Lebanon in 2006. So we would like to raise that question. When about his project “The Inhabitants have another kind of montage that is also somebody writes history, is that only about of Images” What does the term “inhabitant” mean? part of my project. facts? Where does the subjectivity go, where Generally we don’t talk about someone in- does the objective side go? This pretension habiting an image, rather a person or a This montage would lead to a fundamental of documentary, that it can tell you the truth, You will present “The Inhabitants of thing being the object of that image. antagonism in Lebanese politics – that it is based on real things – who has Images” at the BERLIN DOCUMENTARY different Muslim beliefs: Sunnis like Hariri, the power to do that? Who has the means to FORUM. What do we have to expect? I live in a country where the walls of the city Shiites like Hezbollah? How do they create this documentary? It is a kind of editing, are always occupied by street posters. Most actually cohabit in Beirut? which means by implication that whoever “The Inhabitants of Images” is about analysing of them are of killed people. You see faces of does something like that also knows that you political street posters that appear in the city dead persons. Sometimes they appear, There is a big conflict in the region – not only hide certain things, while highlighting certain of Beirut. I took two main pos-ters and I will sometimes they disappear, sometimes you see in the Arab countries, so I include Iran – others. You give the possibility to the specta- talk about them. The first one shows Rafik them moving from one image to another. between the Sunnis and the Shiites. Hezbollah tors to find a distance between what they Hariri, the former Prime Minister, who was These people have a life in the images; they represents the Shiites, Hariri represented are watching and what is actually represented, assassinated in 2005, standing next to inhabit them. Sometimes they are kicked Sunnis. On the one hand it is a Lebanese and this distance allows for one’s own Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was one of the Arab from one image to another, they get destroy- conflict, on the other hand it is a regional thoughts, own interpretations. leaders of the 1950s und 1960s and presi- ed or torn down, they get painted over, but conflict. That is very dangerous, because it dent of Egypt until 1970, when he died. They you still know that there’s a face behind the affects the local politics of Lebanon. This is It also seems to me that you somehow try are standing next to each other. But actually, paint – I take all that metaphorically. Some- why I decided to talk about those images. to get beyond the implicit “pastness” of these two men never met in their lives, and times you see people disappear from images, Separating them is the short chapter about everything documented and open it to they are both dead. The poster puts them in there is a space for them, but they are not the Communist party. We are stuck between possibilities for the future. a way as if they had met. Of course it is a there anymore. It seems irrational, what I’m the two big forces Sunni and Shiite, the photomontage, but it appeared like that on all talking about, but to me this irrationality is Christians are weak these days. It is difficult Absolutely. We can apply the same questions the walls of Beirut. I was surprised about it a kind of tool to understand and to reflect on to find a place, another choice as an individual. as for the documentary. The images are and decided to take it seriously and to believe the phenomenon of how a living society When I talk about the Communist Party I proof of something, but we also know that that Hariri had met with Nasser, and see deals with the dead, how the dead are dealing am kind of talking about myself, because I was images can be manipulated. There is the what this meeting might mean today. with the living, of how the living and the a member of the CP during that time (in the same set of questions for the photographer dead share one space and are intermingled 1980s), but I am also talking about the ab- as for the historian. We don’t know what is So you are developing a historical fantasy, in one territory. sence of the role of the left today. The “hors-champs”, and I am interested in the a political conjecture from a given image? individuals in Lebanon in general can’t find “hors-champs”: that which is outside the So you are reading the visual surface of the any space to express their openness, their image. My work is an attempt to put the Yes, but this is only the first image. The second city, but not in order to get indoctrinated specific position. There is not much of a civil “champs” and the “hors-champs” together. is a series of posters of martyrs of Hezbollah. or to fall for propaganda, but rather to read society. I talk about these identical pos-ters, in which the images counter-intuitively. In a way the young men who had died in the war with you become the author of these images. Can you explain the relation between your Israel appear individually, but the template is But from where did the Hariri/Nasser format and the notion of documentary? the same with all of them. Only the face image originate? and the name varies, the body and the back- I prefer to leave my works between several ground always stays the same. I talk about Actually it has an author, but the author is a formats. One could speak of performance, of this phenomenon of martyrs earning a differ- political party. No individual artist or graphic lecture performance, … But if I had to give a ent body after their death. “Inhabitants of Im- designer designs this poster, but a party, as term I would speak of a “non-academic lecture”. ages” is made of three chapters; this is the it is with most of the street posters. This is It is basically a documentary form – I am second, the one about Hariri and Nasser is the one of the ideas that my project is a result of: sitting there and I am trying to speak about first, and the third is a rather short chapter I take these images more literally than they these posters. I use all the tools of the docu- about the video testimonies of the Communist are meant to be. It comes not only from the mentary. I present evidence, but it is all part Party’s suicide bombers who committed their stance of this political party, but from my of an irrational idea: two dead men meet operations in a very specific period of Leba- sense of literacy, that I make up a scenario that after their death. But I cover it in a very ration- non’s history, which was between 1982 and Hariri and Nasser had accepted to meet al way, in the way in which a documentary The Inhabitants of Images 1987. There is one thing that I noticed: each after their death. So what would they want to could be done. I am always interested to A performance by Rabih Mroué. one suicide assassin is becoming an image tell the Beirut inhabitants? But it’s even more raise this as a question in my work: what is a Wednesday, June 2, 7 pm

36 37 Al-Quds/Jerusalem. Photo: Ali Zaarour, with the kind permission of Zaki Zaarour, 1948 A Blind Spot Product of Other Circumstances Emily Apter teaches French and comparative literature Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer, filmmaker and at New York University. co-initiator of Open Content Alliance. He lives in San Prologue to an exhibition – Performance – Xavier Le Roy Francisco. Catherine David Ariella Azoulay is a teacher, curator, artist and docu- In his new piece Product of Other Circum- mentary filmmaker in Tel Aviv. Uruphong Raksasad is a filmmaker from Thailand. Curator Catherine David expands her on-going stances, Xavier Le Roy continues his inquiry Ecke Bonk is a German typosoph, multimedia artist, Jacques Rancière is a French philosopher born in Algiers. study of the various protocols set by artists into the boundaries of dance and choreo- author, editor and teacher. graphy. His performance simultaneously docu- Alain Resnais is a French filmmaker. in order to question the paradigms defining Stella Bruzzi teaches film at the University of Warwick. canonical forms of documentary. The project ments and enacts Le Roy’s approach to Adrian Rifkin teaches fine art at Goldsmiths College, evolves around key art works from the past Butoh, a Japanese art form that emerged after François Bucher is an artist from Cali, Colombia. London. WW II in the attempt to challenge the role fifteen years as well as new pieces that Eduardo Cadava is professor of English and comparative Ben Russell is an itinerant media artist and curator currently explore the link between aesthetics, history of authority by subverting conventional notions literature at Princeton University. teaching at University of Illinois, Chicago. and politics. “A Blind Spot” thus introduces of dance. The audience witness a form of aesthetic methods that wilfully suspend im- story-telling and narration that draws on generic Tony Cokes is a US post-conceptual artist. He teaches Walid Sadek is an artist and writer born in Beirut, Lebanon. media production at Brown University. mediacy, transparency and coherence as resources such as the internet, books, per- Lee Anne Schmitt is a writer and director of both film devices conventionally enlisted to render sonal memories and anecdotes in order to Chris Marker is a French filmmaker and media artist. and performance events, born in the USA. come closer to understanding an alien form perceptions of ‘truth’. Instead, the project Catherine David is a French curator and art historian. Florian Schneider is a German filmmaker, writer and cu- focuses on inevitably filtered perception, on of culture. Friday, June 4, 9 pm rator. the opacity of reality and history, on the Okwui Enwezor is a curator and art historian born in Nigeria. ‘blind spot’ where the categories of fiction Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is a video and film curator. Omer Fast is a film and video artist born in Jerusalem. She is co-director of Arsenal – Institute for Film and and fact no longer prevail. David’s prologue Talk Show Video Art e.V. Rene Gabri is an artist born in Tehran, Iran. to a subsequent exhibition (BDF2, 2012) Performance – Omer Fast highlights the work of artist Joachim Koester, W.G. Sebald 1944-2001 was a German writer, poet and Ayreen Anastas is an artist born in Bethlehem, Palestine. literary theorist. who explores the tension between imaginary The artist Omer Fast continues his examination Philip Gourevitch is a US freelance writer and journalist. sites, aesthetic tropes and physical places. of how individuals and histories interact Eileen Simpson and Ben White are artists born in Manchester, UK. In his series of photographs Morning of the with each other through narrative. The pro- Brian Holmes is an activist and cultural critic born in Magicians (2005) and his double video pro- gramme starts with one person’s experiences – the USA. Eyal Sivan is an Israeli filmmaker, producer and essayist. jection One + One + One (2006), Koester a real story with close ties to current global Thomas Keenan teaches comparative literature at visits a house in Cefalù, Sicily, known as Eduardo Thomas is a Mexican visual artist and film curator. events and politics, recounted by a real person Bard College. “The Abbey of Thelema”, which once served in the theatrical setting of a live TV talk show. Frederick Wiseman, born in Boston, MA, is a documentary Bettina Knaup is a German curator and cultural producer. as a communal home for the infamous The story is subsequently sent on a journey filmmaker, editor and producer. occultist Aleister Crowley and his group of and becomes the raw material for the ‘broken Joachim Koester is a conceptual artist born in Copen- Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan are an artist couple devotees. A text accompanying the work telephone’ game. With each repetition of hagen. from Rosario, Argentina. provides insight into his extensive research the process and each new rendition of the on the subject. Antjie Krog is a writer, poet and academic born in story, it transforms and mutates further, Kroonstad, Orange Free State, South Africa. ‘looking back’ at the audience in ever-new The installation is on view at the auditorium of and stranger ways. Saturday, June 4, 8 pm Xavier Le Roy is a dancer and choreographer born in Haus der Kulturen der Welt from June 2 to 6. Juvisy sur Orge, France. A conversation between Catherine David and Angela Melitopoulos, born in Munich, Germany, works Joachim Koester takes place on Friday, in the time-based arts. June 4, at 4.30 pm The Catastrophe Conversation between Ariella Marie-José Mondzain is a French philosopher, writer and art historian. Azoulay and Issam Nassar João Moreira Salles is a Brasilian documentary filmmaker. Cultural historians Ariella Azoulay and Issam Edgar Morin is a philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist Nassar discuss the representation of Pales- born in Paris, France. tinian refugees in photographs from 1947 to the early 1950s. Their conversation ad- Michael Mrakitsch 1934–2010 was a German docu- mentary filmmaker. dresses theoretical and aesthetic aspects of interpreting photographs, as well as the role Rabih Mroué, born in Beirut, Lebanon, is an actor, director photography can play in questioning the and playwright. dominant discourse on the creation of the Issam Nassar, a specialist of the cultural history of the State of Israel. Thursday, June 3, 3 pm Middle East, teaches history at Illinois State University.

Marcel Ophuls is a German/French/US documentary filmmaker. 40 41 WED, 2 JUNE THUR, 3 JUNE FrI, 4 JUNE SAT, 5 JUNE SUN, 6 JUNE

12 am 12 am 12 am 12 am 12 am Missing Image | Screening | Möglichkeitsraum | Screen Authorship. Authority. Authenticity. Authorship. Authority. Authenticity. “Schalom oder Wir haben nichts zu Performance | Extra-Disciplinary Art Recent Documentaries from Else- Recent Documentaries from 12.30 pm verlieren”, D: M. Mrakitsch, GER and Media Activism | With Angela where | Screening and Talk | Elsewhere | Screening and Talk | 1983, 130 min, SEN | Introduction Melitopoulos and Brian Holmes “Santiago”, D: J. M. Salles, BR 2007, “Agrarian Utopia”, D: U. Raksasad, 1 pm by Florian Schneider 80 min, SEN | With Eduardo Thomas Thailand 2009, 122 min, SEN | and João Moreira Salles With Eduardo Thomas and Uruphong Raksasad 1.30 pm

2 pm 2 pm Authorship. Authority. Authenticity. Recent Documentaries from Else- 2.30 pm where | Screening and Talk | 2.30 pm 2.30 pm “California Company Town”, D: L. Möglichkeitsraum | Screen Perform- Missing Image | Screening | A. Schmitt, USA 2008, 76 min, OV | ance | Feminism and Performance “Drinnen, das ist wie draußen, nur 3 pm 3 pm Art | With Angela Melitopoulos and anders. Protokolle aus einer psychi- The Catastrophe | Conversation | With Eduardo Thomas and Lee Anne Schmitt Bettina Knaup atrischen Anstalt” D: M. Mrakitsch, Ariella Azoulay and Issam Nassar GER 1977, 97 min, SEN | 3.30 pm Introduction by Florian Schneider

4 pm

4.30 pm 4.30 pm 4.30 pm 4.30 pm A Blind Spot | Conversation | Documentary Moments | Talk and Missing Image | Conversation | Catherine David and Joachim Screening | Take 3 – “Direct”, Florian Schneider and Rick Prelinger 5 pm 5 pm Koester “Truth” and other Myths: Frederick “The Fleetingness of the Documen- Authorship. Authority. Authenticity. Wiseman | “Primate”, D: F. Wiseman, tary” Recent Documentaries from USA 1974, 105 min, OV | With 5.30 pm Elsewhere | Screening and Talk | Frederick Wiseman, Stella Bruzzi “Struggle in Jerash”, D: E. Simpson and Eyal Sivan 6 pm and B. White, UK 2009, 63 min, 6 pm 6 pm OV | With Eduardo Thomas, Eileen Documentary Moments | Talk and Documentary Moments | Talk and Simpson, Ben White Screening | Take 2 – Memory of Screening | Take 4 – Wartime/War 6.30 pm 6.30 pm The Future: Edgar Morin | crime: Marcel Ophuls | “The Memory Opening “Chronique d’un été”, D: J. Rouch, of Justice”, D: M. Ophuls, USA, E. Morin, FR 1961, 90 min, SEN | 7 pm 7 pm 7 pm GER, UK, 1973-76, 278 min, SEN | With Edgar Morin, Rene Gabri, The Inhabitants of Images | Documentary Moments | Talk and With Marcel Ophuls and Eyal Sivan Ayreen Anastas and François Performance | Rabih Mroué Screening | Take 1 – Towards Night (FR/EN/GER) Bucher 7.30 pm and Fog: Alain Resnais | “Guernica”, D: A. Resnais and R. Hessen, FR 1950, 13 min, SEN; “Les statues 8 pm 8 pm meurent aussi” , D: A. Resnais and Talk Show | Performance | Omer C. Marker, FR 1953, 30 min, SEN; Fast 8.30 pm 8.30 pm “Henchman Glance”, D: C. Marker, Rules of Evidence | Reading and FR N.A., 33 min, SEN | With Talk | Okwui Enwezor, Ecke Bonk, Marie-José Mondzain, Adrian Rifkin 9 pm Tony Cokes, Walid Sadek, Juan and Eyal Sivan 9 pm Maidagan and Dolores Zinny Product of Other Circumstances | Performance | Xavier Le Roy 9.30 pm 9.30 pm Authorship. Authority. Authenticity. Recent Documentaries from Else- 10 pm 10 pm 10 pm where | Screening and Talk | “Let Missing Image | Screening | Möglichkeitsraum | Screen Perfor- Each One Go Where He May”, “Djibouti oder Die Gewehre sind mance | D: B. Russell, USA, Suriname 2009, 10.30 pm nicht geladen – nur nachts”, The Life of a Film Archive | With 135 min, SEN | With Eduardo D: M. Mrakitsch, GER 1975, 53 min, Angela Melitopoulos and Stefanie Thomas and Ben Russell SEN; “Djibouti, Wiederbegegnung Schulte Strathaus 11 pm 11 pm mit einer Erfindung 1973/1991”, Party with Barbara Panther, City D: M. Mrakitsch, GER 1991, 60 min, Slang, Berlin (concert), DJ Julieta SEN | Introduction by Florian Aranda, Berlin, and DJ ponediscos Schneider tepepunk, Mexico City

On view June 2 to 6 “Rules of Evidence” – Okwui Enwezor: Installations and works by Tony Cokes, Walid Sadek, Zinny/Maidagan (foyer and upper level); a public reading of books by Philip Gourevitch, Antjie Krog and W. G. Sebald (foyer); four documentary photos in tageszeitung on June 5th (with contributions by Emily Apter, Ecke Bonk, Eduardo Cadava, Thomas Keenan, Jacques Rancière) “A Blind Spot” – Catherine David with an installation by Joachim Koester (auditorium) SEN: Subtitles in English | OV: Original Version