(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
This year's retrospective program at DOK Leipzig consists of films with different geographical origins that deal with key concepts in the history of communism. Under the heading «Commanders – Chairmen – General Secretaries. Communist Rule in the Visual Languages of Cinema, the retrospective program is divided into eight categories, exploring Marx's statement that history repeats itself – first as tragedy, then as horror. Of the large selection of films in the program, I have chosen four that I want to take a closer look at.
Different continents. The quote above from Ronald Kracauer opens the film Yugoslavia. How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body (2013) by the Serbian-born, Berlin-based director Marta Popivoda. She was 32 years old when she made this film, a 60-minute documentary consisting solely of archival recordings from the period 1945 to 2000. Through pictures representing communism and its consequences, Popidova explores Yugoslavia's history after the Second World War. The pictures range from protests against the country's king in 1945; the construction of the new nation with its Stalinist ideology in the years to come; the country's development and student demonstrations in 1968; the bloody dissolution of the country with the 1990s wars in Croatia and Bosnia – which in many ways began with Slobodan Milosevic's speech during a mass meeting in Kosovo in 1989 – and on to the demonstrations against Milosevic in the 1990s and up to his final fall in 2000. The voice-over story is about the filmmaker's own as well as her grandparents 'and parents' memories of this story. The representations of these memories, re-contextualized through the perspective of young people who experienced the downfall of the country and took / tried to take part in shaping the new Serbian society, are particularly emphasized.
Agnes Vardas documentary Black Panthers from 1968 presents a kind of time capsule – so timely that French television, as it was originally intended, did not broadcast it for fear that it could cause the student riots there to flare up again. The 25-minute film from Oakland, California combines the filming of one of the Panthers' peaceful protests with an interview with Huey Newton, one of the movement's icons imprisoned for killing a police officer. The protesters talk about the liberation of blacks by both militant and peaceful means, and are partly in line with the hippies and opponents of the Vietnam War, and partly with Mao's teachings.
I Thomas Sankara – The Upright Man, a 52-minute documentary made by Robin Shuffield for French television in 2005, we are introduced to communism with the struggle against colonialism as a context. Sankara was the man who renamed the former French colony of the Upper Volta Burkina Faso (meaning "the land of the righteous man"), and he is known as the "Che of Africa". A charismatic leader with Marxist views, he ruled the country from 1983 to 1987, when he was assassinated by the forces of his former closest associate and later rival Blaise Compaore.
This year's retrospective program deals with some key concepts in the history of communism.
A much longer path from belief in communism to disillusionment is shown in an impressively precise and straightforward way in the short animated documentary Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square by the Chinese filmmaker Shui-Bo Wang. It was nominated for the Best Documentary Short Academy Award in 1998. Compared to the three films mentioned above, Wang's work is aesthetically and visually pure. No shaky, handheld camera, no shabby archive footage from VHS and TV; quite simply a series of animated, mostly hand-drawn pictures and photographs depicting the filmmaker's path from being a convinced communist to a disappointed dissident after the Tiananmen Square massacre, accompanied by his own narrator's voice.
Drawings and uniforms. Wang's film is an honest, autobiographical look at the fall of an idea, if not the total collapse of an ideology. The pictures he uses include his own drawings and paintings, which are often so beautiful that they take your breath away. All the children of his generation (born in 1960) made drawings of sunrise at Tiananmen Square, and the film opens with an animation of such a picture. This is followed by socially realistic, revolutionary paintings that portray Chairman Mao as well as Wang's family photographs. As an art school student and later professor after the Cultural Revolution in 1981, Wang was influenced by the Renaissance, Romanticism and Surrealism. But the most significant images in this film are communist symbols combined with symbols from the "decadent West", as the country opened up to foreign cultural influence. One such picture is of Marx with Coca Cola bottles placed on top. Photographs of the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square are painted red. These two categories of images tell of the fall of communist ideology – which would hardly have developed in the same way without the influence of the images of the other party, capitalist ideology.
At the other end of the visual and aesthetic spectrum, we find the footage of the Black Panthers holding Mao's little red in Vardas' 16 mm film. But even more significant is the Panthers' awareness of the importance of uniforms – not only their signature attire, black leather jackets, alpine hats and sunglasses, but also the symbols of racial and gender liberation. After centuries of portrayals of beauty as "a white thing" in the media, culture and society, black women wake up and rediscover their roots, expressing it through African clothing and the natural Afro hairstyle. When one of the women talks about liberation and emancipation, her hair becomes a visual expression of the whole movement and its widest meaning. Natural hair becomes a uniform in the struggle for equality.
In Burkina Faso, Sankara not only carried out practical, progressive measures such as vaccination programs and road and rail construction without involving European experts and companies; he also insisted on local production. Government employees were required to wear locally produced clothes in the African style. Thus they became symbols of anti-colonialism and national identity. On the other hand, we see many different military and police uniforms that follow one another during the ten-year period the film covers. The changing uniforms are symbolic expressions of the all-too-frequent changes in Burkina Faso as the country became the subject of power struggles initiated by Europe and surrounding puppet governments. But it is also important, and related to Black Panthers, to remember that Sankara was one of the first heads of state to promote women's rights, and in this way set themselves up against the country's tribal traditions.
Was the revolutionary fervor and conviction misplaced, or was it betrayed?
Tears and recognition. The final images in Shuffield's film are about the murder of Sankara, planned by the French and carried out by Compaore and his ally, Ivory Coast President Félix Houphouët-Boigny. We see chaotic movements of armed forces, followed by images of Africans – not just from Burkina Faso – in tears after Sankara's death. His ideas and actions resonated powerfully across the continent. Although African nations did not have the capacity and ability to put Sankara's ideas into practice – bound as they were by their governments' alliances with European powers – they recognized the course Sankara was trying to set for the continent.
Pictures of weeping crowds are also in the middle part of Popivoda's film, which depicts the situation around Tito's death in 1980. The whole country stood still as the "blue train" with the body of the much-loved president rolled across Yugoslavia.
A large part of Popivoda's film is devoted to the "collective body", represented by parades on Labor Day and rallies on Youth Day with thousands gathered at the Partizana Stadium in Belgrade to celebrate Tito, socialism, fraternity and unity, accompanied by national anthem and song. Confident and enthusiastic, they become their own opposite during the very last public meeting on Youth Day in 1988, when the participants run with torches in a darkened stadium to a bombastic, apocalyptic composition reminiscent of Carmina Burana. A clear signal of times to come.
And then came capitalism. What then follows in Popivoda's film are mass protests and police brutality during the demonstrations in the 1990s, to the sound of punk and rock'n'roll. In both cases, the feeling of belonging to an inspired collective is clear – whether it stands together to support or challenge. Regardless of motive, these collective actions are perceived as quite naive, at least seen from 2013 when the film was released, and even more so today. Was our revolutionary fervor and conviction misplaced, or was it eventually betrayed?
When Yugoslavia fell apart, communist ideology did the same. But what Popivoda points out here is that communism was not replaced by democracy – as the demonstrators in the streets of Belgrade in the period 1991-2000 believed. What they got instead was neoliberal capitalism in its cruelest form, combined with a minority empire and state links to organized crime.
A similar conclusion can be drawn from the other three films: Many Chinese reforms have now made China a leader in the world capitalist economy; The Black Panthers movement weathered rapidly and the United States is experiencing a resurgence of racism, openly supported by the president; Sankara's noble thoughts are sabotaged by ruthless neocolonialism.
The collective attitude and the solidarity struggle for common goods that these films show seems to have gone down with the ideologies; today they are replaced by individualistic values. What is now categorized as "left" and "right" is just a false and increasingly transparent mask of the only remaining ideology: capitalism. We have all become consumer individuals – easy targets for capitalism and willing members of a society obsessed with consumerism. The practice of communism portrayed in the four films proved unsustainable, and decay inevitable. The noble idea of communism now feels romantic in its naivete, yet its value is indisputable.
DOK Leipzig October 30 to November 5, 2017 60th International Leipzig Festival of Documentary and Animated Film
