Re: Cameras for Gaza

From: Freya (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Jan 11 2009 - 13:39:38 PST


Ack, should have waited a little longer before posting and saved myself all the hastle!

Thanks for that Cassidy!

love

Freya

--- On Sun, 1/11/09, Cassidy Dimon <email suppressed> wrote:

> From: Cassidy Dimon <email suppressed>
> Subject: Re: Cameras for Gaza
> To: email suppressed
> Date: Sunday, January 11, 2009, 8:59 PM
> The power of film to tell the stories of peoples directly
> effected by events outside their control -
>
> UNDER THE BOMBS (released by Film Movement, you can find it
> on DVD as a subscriber and maybe in small theatrical release
> - on DVD to all in May) is a recently released
> French/Lebanese co-production that was shot during a
> cease-fire in the Lebanon-Israel conflict in 2006. It's
> shot among the ruble of the Lebanon as we follow a woman in
> search of her son. It is shot with only two professional
> actors, the rest are real refugees, journalists and
> soldiers. It's not a political film at all. It is the
> Lebanese showing the emotional and physical toll of war.
> They don't attempt to claim that any side is better than
> the other or ever get political, it just shows the costs of
> war on innocent people.
>
> It was shot with very little budget or time.
>
> This is why cameras are important.
>
> This is why film is important.
>
> The director: "The film was my reaction to the war.
> Either I gave in to despair or I tried to channel my hatred
> and anger into something creative...At first I thought this
> was an opportunity to develop the 'docudrama genre.'
> But I soon realized that what we were making was a film
> about those who were dying and those whose lives were being
> changed by war...We began to realize that this film was no
> longer about war itself, but its impact of the lives of
> ordinary people...We were being witness to the war...It was
> not like making a film - it was about living the film."
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Peter Snowdon <email suppressed>
> To: email suppressed
> Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2009 12:13:04 PM
> Subject: Re: Cameras for Gaza
>
> While I agree with much of what Fred says here, I think
> that cinema is not quite as powerless as he hints.
> Powerless, in terms of being able to provide context and/or
> rational understanding to events of apparent extreme
> irrationality.
> Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi's Route 181 is as
> substantial a contribution to understanding the current
> situation in Israel and Palestine as are the writings of,
> say, Amira Hass or Tanya Reinhart.
> And Avi Mograbi's films, above all Avenge but One of My
> Two Eyes, ask questions as complex and as uncomfortable as
> those to be found in any other medium or art form.
> Thinking in film isn't limited to montage or narration:
> it's also there in the hard work of giving a structure
> to the whole work which has the power to undo some of the
> simpler assumptions of representation, and turns us back to
> interrogate the resonances which these images, these events,
> these people set up within ourselves.
> An art form which can produce Tarkovsky, Straub and Mekas
> doesn't need to apologise to Thomas Mann, or to Noam
> Chomsky.
> Complexity is always there for the taking, or the making.
> It is up to us whether we want to accept its challenge, or
> not.
> Peter
>
> Fred Camper wrote:
> > malgosia askanas wrote:
> >
> >
> > > Frameworks may not be the right place to debate
> politics, but it
> > > definitely is the right place to debate the
> meaning and political usage
> > > of images. This thread started with someone
> asking for donations to
> > > send cameras to Gaza. In these days of
> routinely staged and doctored
> > > images, is a "documentary" image really
> worth a thousand words? What IS
> > > a "documentary" image worth - without
> knowledge of the matter, without
> > > understanding and thought (all of which require
> words) - other than as a
> > > tool to stir up a knee-jerk reaction?
> >
> > I don't agree with most of what's been posted
> here about Israel's war on Hamas, but I do agree with
> this. Images of killed civilians are not enough, and in fact
> could convey false impressions. I don't agree with
> Israel's attack, nor do I endorse the Allied firebombing
> of Dresden or the US nuking of two Japanese cities. But the
> Enola Gay flyers may well have been right to protest a
> planned exhibit over a decade ago that focused only on the
> bombing. They wanted a larger context, beginning with Pearl
> Harbor. But someone else could also argue that Pearl Harbor
> must be understood in the larger context of the US and
> Japanese imperialism that led up to it. Dresden must of
> course be understood in the context of World War II, started
> by the Germans, or, arguably, by the Germans and the USSR
> together, and not the Allies. The question of whether the
> firebombings of German civilians were justified then goes to
> questions such as whether such attacks helped shorten
> the war, saving other lives, or in fact did not help. Or,
> if you're a complete pacifist, then you have to argue
> that case. Or, if you're some kind of racist, and think
> German lives are less, or more, valuable than others, then
> you have to argue those positions. Is cinema even a good
> vehicle for asking such questions?
> >
> > Cinema has in general not done a good job of making
> intellectual arguments. One might ask of the current war in
> Gaza, for example, under what circumstances is a war that
> will cause many civilian deaths justified? I might argue
> that rocket attacks that have killed no Israelis in recent
> months or years is not enough to justify the current war, in
> which, by now, more than a dozen Israelis have been killed.
> But others, including Israelis, can disagree, and those
> rocket attacks were in no sense legal, and certainly
> terrorized the population that they were directed against,
> and it seems to me that they were as morally unjustifiable
> as earlier Palestinian suicide bombings directed against
> Israeli civilians. The point is, reasonable people can
> disagree about this war, but such disagreements are moral
> and ethical and legal ones, and in that context, it's
> not clear how valuable documentary images from Gaza, or
> Sderot, would be. A complex skein of historical
> facts and arguments is needed to provide context. And even
> then, reasonable people can differ on how wide a net to cast
> and how far back to go in analyzing the situation. Who
> really broke the case fire? Was Israel's unilateral
> pullout from Gaza absent a peace treaty even a wise idea?
> Who is to blame for the absence of a peace treaty? Was
> Israel's earlier occupation of Gaza and the West Bank
> justified? Is its settlement policy justified? Are the
> decades of Arab terrorist attacks on Israel justified? Was
> founding the state if Israel a wise idea, and what about the
> 1948 Arab war to wipe the nascent state off the map? What
> role does knowledge of the Shoah (the "Holocaust")
> play? Or do we start our history with the modern European
> colonization of the Middle East, or with the Crusades, or
> with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D., or
> even earlier than that?
> >
> > In most cases, I have found political documentaries
> sadly lacking in comparison with even a mediocre newspaper
> or magazine article. Moving pictures not only don't add
> much to my understanding of the issues; they can often help
> obscure understanding.
> >
> > On the other hand, I'm not sure that banning
> reporting from Gaza is such a good idea either! Was the US
> military's ban on images of the coffins of and funerals
> of American soldiers killed in Iraq a good idea?
> >
> > I don't know of a cinema that can sensibly debate,
> or even ask, these kinds of questions, so in that sense I
> agree with Malgosia's "require words"
> argument. Dziga Vertov made a tentative stab, though, at
> trying to edit images in a way that widens the context of
> what you see, as in, for example, his famous reverse montage
> starting with a dinner table back through the phases of meat
> production.
> >
> > Fred Camper
> > Chicago
> >
> >
> >
> __________________________________________________________________
> > For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at
> <email suppressed>.
> >
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at
> <email suppressed>.
>
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at
> <email suppressed>.

      

__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.