Re: Cameras for Gaza

From: Rob Gawthrop (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Jan 11 2009 - 14:56:37 PST


Quite!
... there has to be a ceasefire. The USA's abstention from the UN
resolution was a discrace. See this link and put on the pressue:
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/gaza_peace_ads/?cl=167093816&v=2652

Rob

On 11/1/09 21:35, "Freya" <email suppressed> wrote:

> Much of this discussion around politics is largely irrelevant. Civillians are
> suffering greatly at the hands of conflict. It doesn't matter if they are
> Israeli or Palestinian or Jewish or whatever, they are still people.
>
> I would argue that it is not neccessary for the images of such things to be
> seen in the case of a greater political context. This is just an excuse to
> justify situations that have clearly gone very, very badly wrong. It is enough
> to see the pictures and to know that some kind of resolve to the situation
> must be found to prevent suffering and bloodshed.
>
> As such providing cameras to Gaza seems very much fair enough. People should
> certainly be allowed to see what is happening in the world and to think about
> it.
>
> Of course there are those who largely won't care at all but it is still good
> to provide information to those who do.
>
> love
>
> Freya
>
>
>
>
> --- On Sun, 1/11/09, Peter Snowdon <email suppressed> wrote:
>
>> From: Peter Snowdon <email suppressed>
>> Subject: Re: Cameras for Gaza
>> To: email suppressed
>> Date: Sunday, January 11, 2009, 8:13 PM
>> 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>.
>
> Email has been scanned for viruses by Altman Technologies' email management
> service - www.altman.co.uk/emailsystems

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