Harun Farocki - Videogramme einer Revolution AKA Videograms of a Revolution (1992)
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
In Europe in the fall of 1989, history took place before our very eyes. Farocki and Ujica's "Videograms" shows the Rumanian revolution of December 1989 in Bucharest in a new media-based form of historiography. Demonstrators occupied the television station [in Bucharest] and broadcast continuously for 120 hours, thereby establishing the television studio as a new historical site. Between December 21, 1989 (the day of Ceaucescu's last speech) and December 26, 1989 (the first televised summary of his trial), the cameras recorded events at the most important locations in Bucharest, almost without exception. The determining medium of an era has always marked history, quite unambiguously so in that of modern Europe. It was influenced by theater, from Shakespeare to Schiller, and later on by literature, until Tolstoy. As we know, the 20th century is filmic. But only the videocamera, with its heightened possibilities in terms of recording time and mobility, can bring the process of filming history to completion. Provided, of course, that there is history. (Andrei Ujica) Harun Farocki conceived of and assembled Videograms of a Revolution together with Andrei Ujica. Ujica, who was born in Timisoara in 1951, is a Rumanian writer who has been living in Germany since 1981, where he is a lecturer in literature and media theory. He has good connections to Rumanian friends and colleagues who not only opened up the television archives to the authors but also enabled them to get in contact with cameramen from state film studios and with numerous amateur videographers who had documented the events on the streets of Bucharest, often from the roofs of highrise buildings. "If at the outbreak of the uprising only one camera dared to record," said Farocki, "hundreds were in operation on the following day."
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at 11:30 AM
No-Stop City, By Archizoom Associati (2006)
Saturday, April 21, 2007
In 1969, the Archizoom group, while carrying out an experimental work in the field of design, also undertook a research on environment, mass culture and the city, which led to the project No-Stop City. For the first time, a book presents this work which coincides with the zenith of the Italian Radical movement. Gathering all the texts and drawings, this book reveals to us the "Endless City" intertwining architecture with objects and the triumphant consumer society, giving an interpretation where the repetition of a single central element, a building or a group of objects makes up, through a play of mirrors, a catatonic environment, a boundless supermarket, a now reached future to be composed. No-Stop City is a qualityless city in which individual can achieve his own housing conditions as a creative, freed and personal activity. The theoretical project was first published in the review Casabella in 1970, under the title: "City, assembly line of social issues, ideology and theory of the metropolis". As Andrea Branzi puts it, this projects implements "the idea of the fading away of architecture within metropolis". No-Stop City is a critical Utopia, a model of global urbanization where design is the essential conceptual instrument used in the mutation of living patterns and territories. This "endless city" is organized the same way as a factory or a supermarket. It presents an iterative pattern with multiple centres and a neutral, even and unbroken. No-Stop City offers itself as a kind of car park fitted out with inhabitable furniture whose use can be adapted to the circumstances. Interior spaces, air-conditioned and artificially lit, allow the organisation of new inhabiting typologies, open and unbroken, intended for new forms of association and community life. "Considering architecture as an intermediate stage of urban organization that has to be overstepped, No-Stop City establishes a direct link between metropolis and furnishing objects: the city becomes a series of beds, tables chairs and cupboards; the domestic and urban furniture fully coincide. To qualitative utopias, we oppose the only possible utopia: that of Quantity" (Andrea Branzi) *Archizoom Associati(Andrea Branzi, Gilberto Corretti, Paolo Deganello, Massimo Morozzi, Dario & Lucia Bartolini), first group of the Italian Radical Architecture movement (1966-1974).
Andrea Branzi
Andrea Branzi (Florence, 1938) is an architect, a graphic designer and a theorist. He has been living and working in Milan since 1073. He is one of the protagonists of radical Italian Architecture who influenced a whole generation of architects from Franck O. Gehry to Daniel Libeskind, from Rem Koolhaas to Bernard Tschumi. He contributed to the creation of the Archizoom group, of which he was a member from 1964 to 1974. His "Radical Notes", published in the review entitled Casabella, participated in the theoretical debate of that period. From 1974 to 1976, Branzi became a member of Global Tools, a counter-school of architecture and design. Associated to studios of experimental industrial design as early as the end of the 60's (first Alchimia, then Memphis), Branzi has always been concerned with design research and promotion, which implies, to him, fresh relationships between men and objects. From 1983 to 1987, he directed the review entitled Modo and, in 1987, he was awarded the Compasso d'Oro for the whole of his career. He is the author of numerous publications such as La casa calda (1982), Animali domestici: lo stile neo-primitivo (1986), Nouvless de la métropole froide (1991) and Il design italiano 1964-1990 (1996), and has also curated many exhibitions. In parallel, Andrea Branzi has continued to conduct projects in architecture and urban planning through the concept of "weak urbanization".
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at 8:35 PM
Harun Farocki - Leben - BRD aka How to Live in the German Federal Republic (1990)
A critical dissection of modern life in Germany. Composed of thirty-two short scenes taken from instructional and training classes (on everything from stripping, to childbirth, to police tactics), Farocki's intention is to reveal Germany as a place where nothing occurs without rehearsal and preparation.
The author assembles a genre picture of the contemporary FRG with shots of scenes where life is rehearsed, ability/durability is tested. Wherever one looks, people appear as actors playing themselves; they take on roles. A play in the theater of life made up of training courses, fitness tests for things and people. Be it in birth preparation classes for expectant parents or in practice runs for sales talks, on the military training ground or during role-plays for educational purposes. Everywhere the incessant effort to be prepared for the emergency of "reality" can be felt. How To Live In The FRG assembles out of a wealth of details a picture of a society in which childbearing and dying, crying and taking care of people, crossing streets and killing are taught and learned in state or private institutions, indeed have to be learned. The real mechanical ballet is not danced by machines but by people, who move to a music that feeds on bombastic phrases from the realms of social work, bureaucracy and therapy. All together, the collected scenes appear to support the view that a mentality of insurance and providing for the future prevails in the FRG, a country in which happiness as well as misery are supposed to be disciplined by means of social techniques and freed from any measure of unpredictability. And yet How To Live In The FRG goes beyond such an interpretation. The participants in the games, tests, and therapy sessions are not degraded into pieces of evidence for some theory or other. They retain, to varying degrees, something of their dignity. This is a result of Farocki's working method:he has edited the scenes in such a way that even the most nonsensical occurrences as it were explain themselves. (Dietrich Leder, broadcast on February 23, 1990)
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at 1:48 PM
Harun Farocki - Wie man sieht AKA As You See (1986)
In As You See, Farocki searches for those instances and facts in the history of technology that have been overlooked or ignored, also exploring the ambivalent relationship between technologies developed for civil use and those designed for military purposes.
Thus the film for instance describes how in the 1970's workers at the British arms factory Lucas Aerospace attempted to develop socially useful products to replace the company's military output.
Rather than following a linear argument, this essay-film juxtaposes disparate images and weaves them into a mosaic-like structure which makes it possible for the viewers to make their own connections between the different images as well as between the images and the commentary.
My film As You See is an action-filled feature film. It reflects upon girls in porn magazines to whom names are ascribed and about the nameless dead in mass graves, upon machines that are so ugly that coverings have to be used to protect the workers' eyes, upon engines that are too beautiful to be hidden under the hoods of cars, upon labor techniques that either cling to the notion of the hand and the brain working together or want to do away with it.
Harun Farocki
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at 12:55 PM
Harun Farocki - Stilleben AKA Still Life (1997) (2/8)
Thursday, April 19, 2007
According to Harun Farocki, today's photographers working in advertising are, in a way, continuing the tradition of 17th century Flemish painters in that they depict objects from everyday life - the "still life". The filmmaker illustrates this intriguing hypothesis with three documentary sequences which show the photographers at work creating a contemporary "still life": a cheese-board, beer glasses and an expensive watch.
This remarkable film by Harun Farocki is a powerful essay and commentary on contemporary life. It compares the still-lifes of the Dutch painters with the still-lifes of today: Photographs for advertisements for cheese, beer and watches. Farocki's film is about objects because, according to the director, "Gods and heroes are no longer imaginable." Using behind-the-scenes glimpses of modern advertising offices, where employees toil at the proper placement of objects for maximum sales effect, Farocki presents a vision of our reality in which objects bear witness to their producers. In these objects is a new image of man. With English commentary.
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at 7:02 AM
Harun Farocki - I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (2000)
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
This is the first out of eight work's by Harun Farocki which i will post in the near future.
Images from the maximum- security prison in Corcoran, California. A surveillance camera shows a pie-shaped segment of the concrete yard where the prisoners, dressed in shorts and mostly shirtless, are allowed to spend half an hour a day. When one convict attacks another, those not involved lay flat on the ground, arms over their heads.They know that when a fight breaks out, the guard calls out a warning and then fires rubber bullets. If the fight continues, the guard shoots real bullets. The pictures are silent, the trail of gun smoke drifts across the picture. The camera and the gun are right next to each other. This video also emphasizes the social relationship between the one who fires and the one who films, between the one with force and the one who takes shots.
In I Thought I was Seeing Convicts, his most recent film, Farocki uses shots of security cameras of one of the maximum security prisons in America. We see how the camera suddenly zooms in on a fight between two prisoners. The guarding warns the prisoners through speakers, and then fires rubber bullets. A little later they fire live ammunition. By omitting the sound of this fragment and by placing the camera next to the rifleman Farocki emphasises the social relationship between the one who fires and the one who films; between the one with force and the one who take shots. Because of this the images get a very oppressive and critical character.
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at 9:28 AM
Johan Grimonprez - Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1998)
DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, the acclaimed hijacking documentary that eerily foreshadowed 9-11. We meet the romantic skyjackers who fought their revolutions and won airtime on the passenger planes of the 1960's and 1970Õs. By the 1990's, such characters were apparently no more, replaced on our TV screens by stories of anonymous bombs in suitcases. Director Johan Grimonprez investigates the politics behind this change, at the same time unwrapping our own complicity in the urge for ultimate disaster. Playing on Don DeLillo's riff in his novel Mao II: "what terrorists gain, novelists lose" and "home is a failed idea", he blends archival footage of hijackings with surreal and banal themes, including fast food, pet statistics, disco, and his quirky home movies. David Shea composed the superb soundtrack to this free fall through history, best described in the words of one hijacked Pepsi executive as "running the gamut of many emotions, from surprise to shock to fear, to joy, to laughter, and then again, fear."
«Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y» is a video film structured in two fifty-minute parts, presented in the form of an installation The guiding visual thread of the piece is the almost exhaustive chronology of airplane highjackings in the world. The soundtrack is constituted of a fictive narrative inspired by two Don DeLillo novels—«White Noise» and «Mao II»—which, for Grimonprez, «highlight the value of the spectacular in our catastrophe culture.» (...) «Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y» blends photographic, electronic, and digital images, interspersing reportage shots, clips from science fiction films, found footage, and reconstituted scenes filmed by the artist. The work denounces the media spectacle and seeks to detect the impact of images on our feelings, our knowledge, our memory.
Questions of Hans Ulrich Obrist to JOHAN GRIMONPREZ via e-mail
Hans-Ulrich Obrist:
A question about digital television: so far, digital channels are being watched by very few people. Does this non-Audimat situation create a laboratory, an openness for experiments?
To finally go beyond programme television whose "homogeneity ... is intrinsically hostile to art" (Alexander Kluge).
Johan Grimonprez:
By way of introduction: "MTV SMACKED UP ONLINE: IF VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR, WHAT WILL INTERNET DO TO MTV?" Playlist lets you be the veejay; select your faves and they'll be played one after another! Here's where to get the groove:
Hans-Ulrich Obrist:
Couldn't homogeneity possibly trigger a creative context to read mainstream imagery in deviant ways, to read against the grain?
Johan Grimonprez:
Homogeneity as a vocabulary actually did provide a huge source of inspiration to explore certain themes in "dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y".
Hans-Ulrich Obrist:
How do you struggle as an artist or filmmaker to position yourself vis-a-vis mainstream media ?
Johan Grimonprez:
Art and mainstream media seem to remain mad twin sisters, always argueing. Hence the rivalry between a novelist and a terrorist staged as a metaphor in "dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y". In this plot it's the terrorist who's at the winning hand, since he's able to play the media. The narrative is taken from DeLillo's book Mao II, which contends that the novelist's role within society has been replaced by that of bomb makers and gunmen. "What terrorists gain, novelists lose!", says the book. The end of the film though alludes to the fact that media nowadays might even be outplaying the terrorist.
With 600 channels soon provided on New York cable, might the overall homegeneity not desire the other part: the urge for an extreme diversity, a kind-of-supermarket-idea with specialized departments, evidently to push the viewers' quota. The recent corporate merger of ATT-telephone, Media One and Microsoft might very well give new meaning to the act of zapping. Impossible to surf every channel in a nitetime. Destined to keep the finger on the push-button-program of the remote, we will rather plug in the computer-browser, let the search function pop up our favorite clips from the scifi-channel or the history-channel. We could also let a random-veejay-option simply perform the zapping for us, click for: TELEVISION ON MUTE and tune the stereo to some inflight groove.
Hans-Ulrich Obrist:
Homegeneity of mainstream imagery doesn't necessarily have to dictate a homogenous perception of that imagery?
Johan Grimonprez:
Video-viewing rituals amongst the Warlpiri community at Yuendumu (Central Australia) for example seem to sustain cultural invention. Decodings of Jacky Cheng movies or australian TV-soaps like "Neighbours" would be interpreted along kinship obligations and different story-lines proper to Warlpiri narrative. (see Eric Michaels, Hollywood Iconography: A Warlpiri Reading, 1987).
Hans-Ulrich Obrist:
Similarly the gossip culture of catholic mothers in Northern Ireland would claim Joan Collins from the feuilleton "Dynasty" as an emancipatory icon: wasn't Joan rich enough to act independently and trash all those men?
Johan Grimonprez:
Translation of global culture across geographical (and political) boundaries can be read in most contradictory ways: commercials were the most powerful messages of the West, remarked East German writer Heiner Mller.
Hans-Ulrich Obrist:
The television viewer is maybe not a passive consumer: isn't there always a sense of appropriation, creating one's own terms to read mainstream imagery with a certain iconoclastic pleasure?
Johan Grimonprez:
It became the point of departure to set up a mobile video library: "Beware! In playing the phantom, you become one", a project made in collaboration with film critic Herman Asselberghs, and that has been travelling since its intitiation in 1994.
Hans-Ulrich Obrist:
"Beware! In Playing the phantom, you become one" is your mobile video library and archive, it includes films, documentary films, commercials soaps and sitcoms. The programme changed from Kassel to Paris where it was shown after documenta X. How do you related global issues of a travelling archive with local adaptions and local necessities.
Johan Grimonprez:
It is interesting that the programme in Paris was different, it is no longer possible to send homogenous exhibitons on tours and impose them to places but the terms have every time to be (re)negotiated.
Hans-Ulrich Obrist:
How do you integrate participatory elements into your films and other works in general?
Johan Grimonprez:
McLuhan speaks of hot and cold media, cold media being participatory media with few details, like paper, while hot media offer little possibility for participation, for example television. In this context the question of black and white footage is very interesting. The fact that in the middle of color there appear black and white moments causes a disturbance. In an interview I recently made with Alexander Kluge he said that he tried to make films which are also "the ideology of zapping which can be an extreme form of poetry, going much further than collage."
Hans-Ulrich Obrist:
Could you tell me about this last point, about how zapping transcends collage, where does it lead?
Johan Grimonprez:
The participatory elements would be sometimes as simple as a cup of coffee. We would never install our video library without having the cookies, the smell of coffee and the remote control. These elements already induced a platform of conviviality, an atmosphere for chatting. You were invited to grab a cup of hot coffee and pick up the remote to zap through your own selection of videotapes, in a way become your own curator, select your own film programme from a stack of tapes that ranged from twisted commercials, underground documentaries and alternative MTV to mainstream stuff spinned off from Hollywood and CNN. It would imitate a bit the domestic banality of everybody's home video library, and the visitors were also invited to include their own home-grown camcorder tapes: their honeymoon horrors, UFO-testimonies, their top ten of the Oprah Winfreh Show.
The library alluded to the fact that the very act of watching television contains already a participatory nature in itself, the way we receive, contextualize and recontextualize images. It's exactly what we do with the zapping tool (say: "zaptitude"). Zapping buys into the supermarket ideology, but at the same time it can embody a critical distance as well. It stems in fact from video-deck terminology: zapping, i. e. fast forwarding the videotape past the commercial. Commercial break = zapping time.
No need to zap though, the poetry is right there on CNN. CNN has totally surpassed the way Eisenstein and Vertov envisioned montage as a revolutionary tool. Similarly in how the avantgarde filmmakers of the sixties and seventies have become displaced by MTV's nature to swallow every different sort of novel style. The arrival of MTV on Moscovite TV in Russia was even trumpetted in the Russian press as the biggest event since the 1917 October revolution! Vertov reconsidered through the eyes of MTV. Making a collage of color and black and white footage could easily be reduced as merely an esthetic choice. A zapping mode would splice blood and ketchup, like CNN: images of war cut with strawberry ice cream. It would rather point at an epistomological shift in how a "zaptitude" has transformed the way we look at reality. A jumpy fast forward mode has replaced our conventional models of perception and experience. Sometimes I don't even know anymore if we're still in the middle of the commercial break or whether the film has already started. Soon we'll mistake reality for a commercial break.
Hans-Ulrich Obrist:
The taboo of visible death is usually kept from public sphere into private realm. "dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y" evokes Holbein's sarcophagus painting where the viewer is both inside and outside, the active and passive view coincide. Allegorical death and death as a dumb fact. We are inside and outside, there is the obsession with death in "dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y" (You elsewhere described TV's complicity with death as "the desire we have for the ultimate disaster is one aspect of our relationship with death"). It reminds of what Georges Didi Huberman wrote about Sarcophage: "Ce que je vois, ce que je regarde." In your text "Kobarweng or where is your helicopter" you write: "The observer observed."
Johan Grimonprez:
Virilio remarked once that television turned the world into an accident, and that with the advent of virtual reality the whole of reality will be accidented. Each technology invents its own catastrophe, and with it a different relationship to death. The boat invented the sinking of the boat, the airplane invented the crash of the airplane, just as television has reinvented the way we perceive reality and the way we relate to catastrophe, history and death.
TV has turned our notions of private and public inside out, but more importantly the representational modes for portraying actuality and imagination have become intertwined: CNN borrows from Hollywood and vice versa. The everyday talk show has zapped the family away from the coach right on TV and in the opposite direction catastrophe culture invades our living room. The territory of the home overlaps with the space of TV in a much more profound and psychological way than we are possibly aware. In that respect the gap between spectator and history has been narrowed totally. "dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y" ends also with a scene of a hijacked, crashing plane accidently framed on camcorder by honeymooners. They're immediately invited to host Larry King's talk show on CNN to tell how they were able to shoot the footage. The dynamics of abstract capitalism had already turned the revolutionary hijacker into an anonymous suitcase bomb, push-button history now turns the spectator into historian. The spectator has become the hero and political issues are simply reduced to explanations of how to operate a camcorder. Mellencamp (Patricia Mellencamp, High Anxiety, 1990) calls it the shift from catastrophe to comedy: "We can't change the world, but we can change our socks," according to a Nike ad: "It's not a shoe, it's a revolution.
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at 9:01 AM
Learning Book #001 & #002 by Learningsite
Monday, April 16, 2007
Learning Site pays attention to the local conditions it finds in the place where it chooses to work. In the past years Learning Site has mainly worked with resource materials and economies related to the specific situations where work has been carried out. Economic, environmental, labor, property rights, and many other issues are investigated in tandem to produce a variety of perspectives.
Learning Site takes part of a discussion of how knowledge is distributed and produced.
Learning Site is comprised of Rikke Luther (DK) and Cecilia Wendt (S), co-founders of N55 (download N55 BOOK as PDF), Julio Castro (MEX), co-founder of Tercerunquinto, and Brett Bloom (US), co-founder of Temporary Services. The different backgrounds are the basis for expanding the language they built up through sharing and mixing.
Learning Book #001, [Collecting System]:
[Learning Book #001, Collecting System] is a part of an ongoing discussion of how knowledge is distributed and produced. Unused materials are generated in enormous quanitites every day. In this specific discussion, Learning Site is curious about how unused materials are put to use in the local situations they chose to work in. These uses call attention to the factors that Learning Site learns from in order to initiate projects. Economis, environmental conditions, labor, property rights and many other issues are investigated in tandem to produce a variety of perspectives and possible courses of action.
This book shows four projects by Learning Site and the numerous people who worked with them: a house built of caedboard the construction which was learned from the shells of sea urchins, a wearable Walking Ciy, and two houses made of plastic bottles and other material gathered through [Collecting System].
Learning Book #002, [Connecting Systems]:
[Learning Book #002] focuses upon the [Underground Mushroom Gardens] in general and [Underground Mushroom Gardens] during the Singapore Biennale 2006, that took place at the PCF school, Indusroad #79.
[Learning Book #002] is part of an ongoing discussion how knowledge is distributed and produced by paying attention to how systems can be connected with other systems and how these systems could be redefined, added to, expanded and plugged into other systems etcetera. The main systems that are involved and discussed are the regulations to use of land, knowledge systems, food production and trade.
The book includes descriptions of the model [Underground Mushroom Garden], related activity, and three Learning Posters; [Connection Systems, #002] and [Underground Mushroom Gardens, #004A / #004B].
Share these two books via demonoid or go to learningsite and download them!
Related post: Trashing the Neoliberal City: Autonomous Cultural Practices in Chicago from 2000-2005.
at 6:02 PM
Gregor Schneider, Catalogues (1985-2002)
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Since 1985 Gregor Schneider has been building a series of rooms or chambers within his outwardly ordinary house in Monchengladbach. The external construction conceals a series of ever changing growth of inner layers with all walls/doors/rooms not what they seem. Some rooms are empty; others contain elaborately constructed tableaux of found objects and Schneider's sculpture as in Kuche (kitchen), where a jumble of trashed clothes, rubbish and a blow up doll lie stinking on the floor. The sense of disorientation and discomfort is compounded by the imagining of the spaces as a site of some sinister trap or drama.
This torrent holds nine catalogues from 1985 to 2002.
Gregor Schneider.1985-1992,
Edited: Impulse Galerie Löhrl, Mönchengladbach 1992,
Text: Raimund Stecker and Ingrid Bacher
Gregor Schneider Haus ur 1985-1994,
Edited: Krefelder Kunstmuseen, Krefeld 1994
ISBN: 3-926530-69-3
Gregor Schneider,
Edited: Kunsthalle Bern, Bern 1996,
Interview with Ulrich Loock,
Text: Julian Heynen ISBN: 3-85780-107-7
Gregor Schneider -töten,
Peter-Mertens Stipendium,
Edited: Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn 1996
Text: Annelie Pohlen
Gregor Schneider. Tote Jungfrauen. 19.Dezember 1997,
Edited: Galerie Foksal, Warschau, 1997
Gregor Schneider,
Edited: Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris 1998, Interview mit Ulrich Loock, Text: Laurence Bosse
ISBN: 2-87900-410-1
Gregor Schneider. Keller. 30.03-21.05.2000,
Edited: the Secession, Wien 1999
Text. Noemi Smolik
Gregor Schneider. Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff Stipendium 2000,
Edited: Schmidt-Rotluff
Förderungsstiftung Berlin, Berlin 2000
Gregor Schneider. Haus ur Fotos und Videos.
Edited: Stiftung DKM, Duisburg 2002,
Text: Ulrich Loock
Download the catalogues via Gregor Schneider's personal page or help me share them via demonoid!
ps. I wanted to print a few of these catalogues, but for some fantastic reason, they are protected with a password. I've written whoever runs Gregor Schneider's page, for the password. If i get it, which i doubt, i will of course post it in here.
at 12:19 PM
Hubert Sauper - Darwin's Nightmare (2004)
IMDB writes: A documentary on the effect of fishing the Nile perch in Tanzania's Lake Victoria. The predatory fish, which has wiped out the native species, is sold in European supermarkets, while starving Tanzanian families have to make do with the leftovers.
NY Village Voice review by Dennis Lim:
The Descent of Man: Essential doc views globalization through prism of Tanzanian eco-disaster, sees colonialism.
August 2nd, 2005 4:16 PM
The Nile perch was introduced to Lake Victoria some 40 to 50 years ago, an apparent attempt to replenish the overfished waters that led to the extinction of hundreds of indigenous species. An oily-fleshed fish that reaches over six feet in length, the Lates niloticus rapidly emerged as the fittest specimen in its new habitat, depleting the food supply and preying on smaller fish (including its young). In a 2001 report, the World Conservation Union deemed the Nile perch one of the planet's 100 "worst invasive alien species." This ongoing ecological disaster happens to be the basis for a multimillion-dollar business: Tanzania, which owns 49 percent of Lake Victoria, is the main exporter of perc to the European Union. Bitter ironies come thick and fast in Hubert Sauper's essential documentary Darwin's Nightmare, and the most obvious one may be that this unnatural abundance of a profitable protein source—an economic godsend, if you ask the on-message factory managers and government officials—coexists with inhuman levels of famine and poverty.
Quietly outraged and actively upsetting, Darwin's Nightmare spirals out from a case study of one cannibalistic killer to a far bigger and more rapacious fish. The ruthless supremacy of the Nile perch and its devastating effect on the lake's ecosystem constitute a gruesomely resonant metaphor for the impact of global capitalism on local industry. From intimate camcorder interviews with fishermen, fishery workers, cargo pilots, and the prostitutes and street kids on the fringes of this lakeshore economic network, Sauper, an Austrian-born, Paris-based documentarian, constructs a detailed seismograph of predatory free trade's ripple effect.
At one point, after viewing a cautionary video about Lake Victoria at an ecological conference, a Tanzanian minister blithely accuses the filmmakers of accentuating the negative: "What about the beautiful areas?" It's safe to assume he would take greater exception to Darwin's Nightmare, a crescendo of dismay that uncovers fresh horrors in almost every scene. Each appalling revelation is topped by a ghastlier one. Not only do the fishermen live in work colonies with no medical care and easy access to HIV-positive prostitutes (a pastor Sauper interviews gently discourages condom use), they're sent home to die before they get too ill, due to the prohibitive cost of corpse transport. Not only can most Tanzanians not afford the thick white perch fillets that are consumed by millions of Europeans daily, they're forced to literally pick on the rotting remains.
Darwin's Nightmare finds its most Brueghelian images at a sort of open-air factory, where ammonia-emitting, maggot-swarmed perch carcasses are dried and fried, repackaged as a local subsistence food. And in an even grimmer form of recycling, the factories' leftover packing materials are collected by children who melt down the plastic and inhale the fumes.
Sauper avoids voice-over and uses sparing titles, but there's no mistaking the film's point of view. In one unapologetic gut-punch sequence, he cuts from the fish dump, where an employee partially blinded by ammonia attests that her life has improved since she started working there, to a European trade delegation droning on about the perch industry's improving infrastructure and cleanliness standards, and in turn to footage of young boys fighting over a few mouthfuls of rice. The film returns repeatedly to the visual motif of Russian cargo planes taking off and landing over Lake Victoria—Sauper at first seems to be making the point that they leave heaving with crates of fish (the wrecks of overloaded planes still dot the airstrip) and fly in empty, a symbol of the take-and-take relationship that the West has long dictated with Africa. But the gradually divulged reality proves worse still: Many of the planes arrive loaded with the weapons that sustain the bloody conflicts raging nearby.
Praising Sauper's Kisangani Diary, an account of Rwandan refugees in the Congo, the ethnographer and filmmaker Jean Rouch used the phrase "a cinema of contact." Darwin's
Nightmare likewise benefits from Sauper's proximity with his subjects, some of whom possess a big-picture understanding of their plight that is of no practical use to them. Perhaps the film's most vivid figure, Raphael, a night watchman with bloodshot eyes, notes that war, besides profiting the powerful, is also an appealing financial option for those lucky enough to join the army. Darwin's Nightmare strings together cruel ironies into a work of harrowing lucidity. It illuminates the sinister logic of a new world order that depends on corrupt globalization to put an acceptable face on age-old colonialism.
NY Timez review by A.O. Scott:
Feeding Europe, Starving at Home
Published: August 3, 2005
"Darwin's Nightmare," Hubert Sauper's harrowing, indispensable documentary, is framed by the arrival and departure of an enormous Soviet-made cargo plane at an airstrip outside Mwanza, Tanzania. The plane, with its crew of burly Russians and Ukrainians, will leave Mwanza for Europe carrying 55 tons of processed fish caught by Lake Victoria fisherman and filleted at a local factory. Though Mr. Sauper's investigation of the economy and ecology around the lake ranges far and wide - he talks to preachers and prostitutes, to street children and former soldiers - he keeps coming back to a simple question. What do the planes bring to Africa?
The answers vary. The factory managers say the planes' cavernous holds are empty when they land. One of the Russians, made uncomfortable by the question, mutters something vague about "equipment." Some of his colleagues, and several ordinary Mwanzans, are more forthright: the planes, while they occasionally bring humanitarian food and medical aid, more often bring the weapons that fuel the continent's endless and destructive wars.
In any case, they leave behind a scene of misery and devastation that "Darwin's Nightmare" presents as the agonized human face of globalization. While the flesh of millions of Nile perch is stripped, cleaned and flash-frozen for export to wealthy countries, millions of people in the Tanzanian interior live on the brink of famine. Some of them will eat fried fish heads, which are processed in vast open-air pits infested with maggots and scavenging birds. Along the shores of the lake, homeless children fight over scraps of food and get high from the fumes of melting plastic-foam containers used to pack the fish. In the encampments where the fishermen live, AIDS is rampant and the afflicted walk back to their villages to die.
The Nile perch itself haunts the film's infernal landscape like a monstrous metaphor. An alien species introduced into Lake Victoria sometime in the 1960's, it has devoured every other kind of fish in the lake, even feeding on its own young as it grows to almost grotesque dimensions, and destroying an ancient and diverse ecosystem. To some, its prevalence is a boon, since the perch provides an exportable resource that has brought development money from the World Bank and the European Union. The survival of nearly everyone in the film is connected to the fish: the prostitutes who keep company with the pilots in the hotel bars; the displaced farmers who handle the rotting carcasses; the night watchman, armed with a bow and a few poison-tipped arrows, who guards a fish-related research institute. He is paid $1 a day and found the job after his predecessor was murdered.
Filming with a skeleton crew - basically himself and another camera operator - Mr. Sauper has produced an extraordinary work of visual journalism, a richly illustrated report on a distant catastrophe that is also one of the central stories of our time. Rather than use voice-over or talking-head expert interviews, he allows the dimensions of the story to emerge through one-on-one conversation and acutely observed visual detail.
But "Darwin's Nightmare" is also a work of art. Given the gravity of Mr. Sauper's subject, and the rigorous pessimism of his inquiry, it may seem a bit silly to compliment him for his eye. There are images here that have the terrifying sublimity of a painting by El Greco or Hieronymus Bosch: rows of huge, rotting fish heads sticking out of the ground; children turning garbage into makeshift toys. At other moments, you are struck by the natural loveliness of the lake and its surrounding hills, or by the handsome, high-cheekboned faces of many of the Tanzanians.
The beauty, though, is not really beside the point; it is an integral part of the movie's ethical vision, which in its tenderness and its angry sense of apocalypse seems to owe less to modern ideologies than to the prophetic rage of William Blake, who glimpsed heaven and hell at an earlier phase of capitalist development. Mr. Sauper's movie is clearly aimed at the political conscience of Western audiences, and its implicit critique of some of our assumptions about the shape and direction of the global economy deserves to be taken seriously. But its reach extends far beyond questions of policy and political economy, and it turns the fugitive, mundane facts that are any documentary's raw materials into the stuff of tragedy and prophecy.
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