Fuzzynarrators-report
Report introduction (by Colm)
Day by day personal reports
Monday AM (by Max)
Monday PM (by Pleun)
Tuesday AM (by Natalie)
Tuesday PM (by Julia)
Wednesday AM (by Stone & Chloe)
We discussed the narration of essay film, which is in between fiction film and non fiction film, narration based on the author's point of view, exposed the gap between narration and reality. We watched following essay films as examples and discussed this form of narration. Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s video “The Unreliable Narrator” narrates the 2008 Mumbai attacks, sourced from CCTV recordings and Bollywood films, switched the different angles between the attackers and their controllers. The author's description as a narrative thread, however the images could not match the description well which made the narration more fuzzy. Johan Grimonprez's film Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y,used clips from archieve footages, science fiction films, home video and reconstituted scenes, traces the history of airplane hijackings as portrayed by mainstream television media.
Wednesday PM (by Sara)
“How is history written? By whom? And for whom?” This is how Solveig Gade started her essay on performing archive, taking two collectives as her material of reference; Rimini Protokoll, a collective founded in 2002 by three German artists, and The Atlas Group, which, counter to common belief, only comprises one member, Lebanese artist Walid Raad. And this is where our discussion on the third day of the thematic seminar proceeded.
Watching at Rimini Protokoll’s work, Call Cutta, in parallel to Walid Raad’s discursive project, The Atlas Group, we examined the relations between narrative, visual-photographic, and spatial components that created an alternative approach to history and to historical events.
In Call Cutta, Rimini Protokoll staged a number of situations where call center agents (experts in their field of work) from Kolkata would call a participant in the performance; a German person living in Berlin. The purpose of the call is to guide the participants through their own city. The caller, who had never been to Berlin and whose identity is concealed, speaks with confidence and ease, borrowing elements from personal experience to narrate the city. The Indian and the German conversation partners start to share a piece of their respective histories on one geographic location. It is as if one is re-enacting or travelling in both space and time, experiencing history at first hand, establishing a relation with the other, with colonialism, Nazism, and globalization: creating the power of alternative histories.
When it comes to the The Atlas Group, and considering the fuzzy history of Lebanon’s 30 years of violence, one more element is added to the question posed by Rimini Protokoll. It is how create history from scratch, in the absence of a major narrative, rather than trying to create alternatives. As Lebanon's 15-year-long civil war supposedly ended with a general amnesty law, it was a general amnesia that was forced on the war-torn country. How can you think of the past, when the past has willingly erased itself? How can you talk about traumatic events when an entire nation is suffering some sort of forced forgetfulness?
Walid Raad tried to create an "archive" of the war. He collected notebooks, home videos, documents, letters, memories that belong to people, ordinary people affected by years of destruction. He performed those archives over the years; using his collection as a screenplay to his 10-year-long performance, and both time and space seem to bend and adapt to the representation of the irrepresentable.