STAGING THE REVOLUTION
A selection of films by Abounaddara collective was presented as part of the rich and effervescent Festival Hors Pistes at Centre Pompidou. From 2011 to 2017, this collective was dedicated to producing one film every Friday, on the subject of the Syrian revolution. It may seem simple, but whoever has been curious enough to watch a few of these short pieces will have been struck by their variety, their density, their accuracy, their inventiveness, their sense of image and thus – not “in addition” –, by their political relevance. Furthermore, the initiative was sparked, according to its authors, by western media’s 2011 rush for images of dead bodies and misery that used the worst clichés of orientalist tradition: oftentouching images, but that rested upon formatted feelings.
Their films are therefore thought through so as to avoid causing any vague sentimentality. To avoid reproducing that imagery and to constitute another. Which sometimes borders on excess singularity, with interviews of anonymous people who represent only themselves (yet who truly represent themselves). Other times, it is a microevent of civil war: a woman is picking figs, she notices a missile that has just fallen not far away; young people, on the contrary, are launching missiles, perhaps on Alep. As one of the group members mentioned repeatedly during one of two soirées at Centre Pompidou (1), in order to see the revolution as a filmmaker, one has to stage it: it is not there, on display, ready to be filmed. Even the interviews, so seemingly spontaneous, have been carefully thought through in terms of framing, duration and editing. To avoid clichés, the simple yet radical idea is to “defamiliarize” what is shown, at the accepted risk of not being understood by those who are used to the media’s banalized vocabulary. To show the revolution, to see the revolution: this reminds us of Dziga Vertov, who raised similar issues, and who also required viewers to agree to not see what they already knew, but rather to see something puzzling instead (in La Dame de Syrie, a woman teaches a hundred young girls to curl their hair, although they all wearing headscarves and are meeting in a cellar of sorts). Vertov counted on the Party’s support to release his film (he never received it). Abounaddara has no party to support it, and the films are shown wherever possible, be it in an artistic institution (festivals, museums), or, first and foremost, on Internet (2): at least they were and still are viewed. I admit having conjoined these two events based solely on my own taste. However, with the Swiss filmmaker as well as the Syrian filmmakers, I feel the same confidence in inventiveness and style, the same distaste and refusal of the “compassional” – that feeble value which films (and others) overindulge in. Once in a while, a bit of rigour can be soothing.
Translation: Jessica Shapiro