In 2006 regisseert Michael Mann zijn negende film. Miami Vice, een duister fresco over het leven van twee undercoveragenten, geeft in gewelddadig detail de gevolgen weer van de mondialisering van de criminaliteit en de collusie tussen politiek en economie, of zelfs het opgaan van het ene in het andere. Mann is op dat moment op het toppunt van zijn artistieke kunnen en bekleedt een bevoorrechte positie in Hollywood: als gerespecteerd figuur in het “milieu” en vaste waarde binnen de industrie demonstreert hij eens te meer zijn vermogen om de logica van de blockbuster (en dat is hoe Miami Vice wordt aangeprezen) om te buigen tot een persoonlijk universum, zodat we soms zelfs de indruk krijgen dat het hier om een grootschalige verduistering van fondsen gaat (de film kostte meer dan 150 miljoen dollar) ten voordele van een radicaal werk dat geen enkele toegeving doet aan de vormelijke en stilistische ambities van zijn maker.

The western used to be the secret garden of male imagination. Access to it has been closed off, the paradise parceled out, its inhabitants dispossessed. Next up are “the men who like technology”, but cowboys like horses, landscapes, showdowns. For this, freedom is the condition, reward and punishment.

André Bazin wordt weleens de “uitvinder van de filmkritiek” genoemd. Hele generaties filmcritici en filmmakers, niet in het minst die verbonden met de Nouvelle Vague, zijn schatplichtig aan zijn schrijfsels over film. Film opent een “venster op de wereld”, aldus Bazin. Zijn geschriften zouden ook belangrijk zijn voor de ontwikkeling van de auteurstheorie. Bazin: “Laten we wel wezen, westerns worden niet serieus genomen! Er is uiteraard geen gebrek aan intellectuelen die verklaren dat ze dol zijn op westerns. Men hoort genoeg deftige oude heren het luid verkondigen. Maar zelfs zonder op zoek te gaan naar wat voor aanstellerij deze geloofsbelijdenis inhoudt (vraag naar titels en u zult zien dat deze zogenaamde “westernliefhebbers” er maar één of twee per jaar zien!), kan men er bijna zeker van zijn dat ze op een misverstand berust.”

André Bazin is sometimes called “the inventor of film criticism”. Entire generations of film critics and filmmakers, especially those associated with the Nouvelle Vague, are indebted to his writings on film. Film opens a “window on the world”, according to Bazin. His writings would also be important for the development of the auteur theory. Bazin: “Chris Marker’s Sunday in Peking unfortunately lasts just twenty minutes, and the crop of images seems poor compared to Pedrazzini’s. But the image is not limited here to itself. Its value is developed in two supplementary dimensions: the editing and the commentary.”

Atteyat Al-Abnoudy, a pioneer of documentary filmmaking, has been making the voices of the poor heard since the 1970s. We meet her when the first Women’s Film Festival is paying tribute to her. (...) Some call her “the poet of the documentary”. Others criticize her for portraying the poor, the bratty children, the run-down places and the abject sides of reality. Likewise, Egyptian television, the only means of broadcasting her work, asks her to disclaim her inventories of misery in order to benefit from funding. She retorts to her detractors: “You must know how to reveal reality with its dark and luminous sides, without hiding an admiration for the total commitment of the beings whose lives meet History.”

In ‘Een kijker onder de anderen’ laten Herman Asselberghs en Gerard-Jan Claes via e-mail allerlei gepassioneerde filmliefhebbers uitvoerig aan het woord over hun kijkpraktijk. Filmmakers, kunstenaars, critici, onderzoekers, auteurs, programmatoren, bioscoopbezoekers, tv-fanaten, netflixers, youtubers, torrentgebruikers,… Na de eerste aflevering met Herman Asselberghs zetten we de reeks voort met Rebecca Jane Arthur, een Schotse beeldend kunstenares die in Brussel woont. Naast haar artistieke praktijk werkt Arthur als producent, schrijver, copy-editor en vertaler. Ze is ook medeoprichter van elephy, een productie- en distributieplatform voor film- en mediakunst gevestigd in Brussel.

“The International Women’s Year provided me with the opportunity to make it [Fatma 75]. I figured that, for the first Tunisian film entirely devoted to this subject, I must not resort to fiction but make an analytical work. Through this film, I set about demystifying what is called ‘the miracle of Tunisian women’s emancipation’.”

Fatma 75’s approach is quite original. The film is based on essays and histories written on the Tunisian feminist movement, using fiction to make its message accessible to the general public. Selma baccar: “As for my experience as a woman director, I think it was very important for me. My relationship with the crew and the actors was excellent. The shooting of Fatma 75 was “all roses”. On the other hand, in order to obtain the necessary funding for the production of the film, I felt a great mistrust from some of the people in charge, although I had a special card up my sleeve: a film about women made by a woman. But the problem of film production in Tunisia is the same for men and women: it’s negative for both of them.”

It is an intriguing film because of its original position in the field of Flemish film production. This is not some attempt at a standard technical finish that’s devoid of aesthetic politics. It is a clearly defined boundary, an emphatic style within which the entire film must develop. This is an unusual (almost suicidal) road for a young (Flemish) filmmaker. His colleagues are out to make attractive films that people will consider solid and professionally made. Films that are able to attract official subsidies, but only lead the public to believe that “we” might one day be able to make one too. 

“But I’m going to reveal a military secret to you that I haven’t revealed to anyone else, because the Tricontinental is as dear to you as it is to me. Thus, your interview will not be like others. People wonder why Heiny Srour has always been a pioneer, a groundbreaker, both in substance and form, why she has always gone off the beaten track. Why, in all of Arab cinema, was she the first to shoot in Dhofar and, also, to go to Vietnam? Why has she been innovative in various domains? The reason is that I was fortunate enough to be born in Lebanon, part of an ultra-minority, unrepresented in Parliament. That immediately offers you a wide-angle view of the world, which the Anglo-Saxons call ‘strategic thinking’.”

Certainly, The Hour of Liberation has arrived. But what kind of liberation is it? Heiny Srour not only understands it in the political sense of the term, but in a more absolute sense. The liberation of Arab women is at the heart of this film, which has, unfortunately, hardly been screened in our countries. The difficulties encountered during and after the shoot of the film need to be addressed. They give you an idea of what a woman has to face when she decides not to give in and to push her project to the limit...

“The Hour of Liberation is, therefore, a partisan film at all levels. In terms of the montage as well: you can’t place images filmed on both sides of the fence in any order, and tell the viewer to choose sides; that would put oppression and freedom, injustice and justice on the same level. The film is constructed on a structure that rejects the bourgeois conception of ‘objectivity’: it clearly takes sides, without necessarily hiding the difficulties of the struggle, without hiding the contradictions, without ultimately lapsing into triumphalism. The entire montage is conceived to produce an analysis of what a people’s war is.”

De surrealisten van het eerste uur, nog vaag vervuld van een dadaïstische geestesgesteldheid, zetten alle zeilen bij en mengden vrolijk disciplines door elkaar om het publiek te verbluffen. Terwijl hun geschriften, theater, muziek en schilderkunst al gauw floreerden, bleef het gebruik van film lange tijd een moeizamere kwestie, in België nog meer dan elders.

“I began by making film reports, documentaries, and I didn’t come to fiction until much later. The boundaries between the two aren’t very clear-cut, however, and there are often documentary elements in fiction films and vice versa. At the time, there was a fabulous reporting tradition, with film crews in conflict zones that didn’t hesitate to take risks and demonstrate a certain situation by bringing us the footage. Resorting to cinema, especially to documentaries, in order to provoke or accompany social change, to denounce or to provide a basis for action, all this was very much present when I started.”

There are encounters that withstand long separations because they happened at a particular time. That goes for you, who I lost sight of for a long time, and who I met in the liveliest days of our lives. Are there lives outside of lively days? Alas, yes. Many years later, we ran into each other and caught up in the queue for a plane from Paris to Cairo, and then in Alexandria we met again, and... since then, we met again where we had parted, in the intimacy of History, the Tunisian revolution had just broken out and our hearts were cheerful.

“Today, nine years later, I say to myself: “It’s no longer a matter of taking a position.” That’s where my films are headed and that’s what brings me to fiction. I think I’m meeting my time, the wave of complete scepticism, of doubt, which means that in the fiction to come I have completely abandoned any political point of view – even if everything is political. Even if there is no doubt that there has been a political position. The desire I had to be on TV, to reach a lot of people, meant that my work was concerned with the imagery, which was much more powerful than militant film.”

What does it mean to make a film when you are a woman, an Algerian, a novelist (writing in French) and you decide to make it in your own country, for the people of that country, with the widest distribution possible, as it is a film for television?

To give a rhythm to the images of reality for twenty years of everyday life in the Maghreb, where each of the three countries has paid its death toll to obtain its independence. This work, which should be a simple “historical” visualization, I approach as a mined area. I apprehend it as an explosive that awakens from my past, from any past, the engulfed pains we believe to be rotten or defeated, I don’t know. They come alive again, they dress again as faceless ghosts, but veiled, as if they suddenly demanded the unfolding of a purifying liturgy.

So your film is more a film about space than about women?

Yes, because saying that my film is a film about women doesn’t mean anything. I’ll always make these films... Female bodies, women are my subject. Like a sculptor somehow, who uses a certain material, while another sculptor will use another material. That should mean something, shouldn’t it? I think that’s what the Cinémathèque audience couldn’t stand; I’ve removed men from my film. But what can I say, except that I’ve just shown what exists in reality. I intentionally separated the sexes in the image, as in reality. The intention is feminist, and why not? I wanted to show the number one problem of Algerian women, which is the right to space. Because I was able to verify that the more space the women had, the firmer they stood.

The source that irrigates Fertile Memory springs from two poles that constitute the foundations and permanence of the Palestinian soul: usurped land and women. Few films show daily life in the physical and temporal reality (32 years for Mrs Farah Hatoum) of the Israeli occupation. And if these films exist, their lack of credibility is such that at best, we make do with imagining the thoughts behind the gestures and gazes – the deepest dimension of which only the prism of culture will render.

“Nothing can fix the finite which lies between the two infinities that enclose and flee from it.” This formula by Pascal may very well apply to the films of Edmond Bernhard, the most brilliant filmmaker Belgium has ever known. His entire oeuvre essentially consists of five short films made between 1954 and 1972, less than two hours of screening time in total: Lumière des hommes (1954), Waterloo (1957), Belœil, ou Promenade au château de Belœil (1958), Dimanche (1963) and Échecs (1972).

The day I decided to think about the future of cinema, I told myself I wouldn’t live to see it. I asked myself if the future is always in front of us. So I looked ahead, then I turned around. 

“I already knew that you can’t just make a film overnight with people who aren’t actors. Especially when you want to make a feature film. And there I was, plunging into a spoken feature-length film. Some friends had told me, “Be careful!” I responded, “Damn it! Flaherty made Nanook, and he made Moana!” “Ah yes, okay, but that’s silent film! You, your peasants, when they open their mouths, you’ll see, it’ll be a catastrophe.” I hung on all the same. Of course, you can’t make them play Le Cid or Hamlet... You have to make them play something that’s closer to their hearts.”

There’s no lack of so-called realist films, whether they are news stories or slices of life. There’s not even a lack of peasant films. Why is Farrebique the odd one out? That’s where, for me, Rouquier’s genius comes in, his egg of Columbus. He understood that verisimilitude had gradually taken the place of truth, that reality dissolves in realism. He painstakingly set out to discover it, to bring it back to light, to bring it up naked from the well of art.