Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2021: a review
- luisakarman
- Dec 6, 2021
- 9 min read
Updated: Dec 10, 2021
I’m sat writing this review exactly one year after I published the last one (only to release it 2 months later because that's just how hectic life got). In that year, my relationship to film went from what I described as based on “childhood classics and guilty pleasures” to something else entirely. Not only have I gotten way more into film as a medium and practice, I’ve also had the chance to analyse films as part of my Anthropology degree, which included weekly film screenings and discussions on the changing landscape of ethnographic film. Especially in contrast with my apparently disinterested viewership in the past, this was a whole new way to experience a film - examining it, taking notes, and considering the boundaries between documentary and fiction, and identifying what was or not ethnographic about a certain film.
My awareness of the forms filmmaking could take changed dramatically as I was introduced to works ranging from the infamous Nanook to Kim Longinotto’s fascinating Dream Girls. Perhaps through this lens, I noticed an ethnographic line running through BFMAF 2021 - not in terms of theme (as themes have been labelled ‘ethnographic’ more on account of their perception than their own characteristics), but in the form of musings on the ethnographic in film. This is most evident in the two ‘In Focus’ sections, highlighting the works of filmmakers Nguyễn Trinh Thi and Rajee Samarasinghe, the first drawing on her background in ethnographic film and the second tackling contemporary issues in Sri Lanka through the “deconstruction of ethnographic practices”. Below, I'll discuss their works and some other highlights of the festival for me. It's worth mentioning BFMAF operated a hybrid festival this year, both in person and online. I attended the latter, which included the films and a series of online events and resources, including an online exhibition - these are still available here!
still: Letters from Panduranga
Nguyễn's Letters from Panduranga, “an essay film in the form of a letter exchange”, is set around the spiritual centre for the ancient indigenous Cham culture, now an ethnic minority in Vietnam, threatened with a governmental plan for nuclear power plants. The notion of a ‘threatened’ or ‘disappearing’ peoples is one tempting to the modes of salvage anthropology and the lenses of those who claim they seek to preserve images of ‘traditional’ ways of life. Nguyễn chooses a different perspective, deconstructing the notion of objective observation and visual record - in favour of a not-at-all-detached point of view of the one behind the lens. She does this by giving insight into personal creative dilemmas and processes of experimentation explored in the film via first-person narration, sharing, for example, how she was “trying different methods of documentary and fiction” such as new modes of portraiture of the Cham (as in the image below).
By declaring, “I am not an ethnographer, systematically studying and recording the Cham’s way of life, traditions, rituals; nor am I a journalist who could write about issues directly”, the artist highlights the issue of positionality as an outsider to the Cham community, and acknowledges the politics and power dynamics of representation, listening to Cham intellectuals and “trying to avoid speaking on behalf of the other”.
Nguyễn therefore turns away from creating a totalising portrait of the subjects (as many ethnographers have attempted, in and beyond film) and towards what BFMAF’s introduction by Christina Demetriou describes as “contemplating the relational dynamic between the subject and the lens”. This contemplation by no means abstracts from the narrative of Cham contemporary socio-political issues. As Nguyễn states in one interview: “The only way for me to tell the story is to talk about two stories at once: the intimate story of the Cham and the wider story of colonialism, war, contemporary politics and the position of the artist”
Particularly interesting to me was the discussion of the relationship between ‘the Cham of today’, and the representation of the Cham as a civilisation. The film explores this by focusing on the setting of the My Son temples, UNESCO heritage sites that, according to the filmmaker, symbolise the idea of an extinct Asian civilisation. Exploring the (often uneasy) relationship between life and heritage, the narration states: “My Son looks like a beautifully dead museum”.
When describing the transformation of a holy space in to a tourist space, the narrator says “even the living temples are in the process of being robbed of their spirits”.
This process is clear in the fact that rituals are being made to fit around the determinations of tourism - a process described in the film as “invisible beauties (…) forced into hiding in the name of tourism”, as “culture is being vulgarised”. This connected to a series of debates on the anthropology of heritage, tourist art and authenticity, and even the ‘ethnographic present’ (I’ll attach a list with a few readings and films! on the subject that might link nicely to this one).
Most resounding to me, though, was the filmmaker’s take on the issue of representation of cultures in the space of museums - a hugely contentions subject at the moment, and one that connects areas around the globe (just as the colonialism that created these issues had done in the past, you see?).
Nguyễn ties into this debate by addressing the particularities of the Cham Museum, which used to be the Musée Henri Parmentier - named after a French archaeologist who recorded Cham monuments in Indochina. The filmmaker included another resounding quote, said originally about the process undergone by objects of African origin as they enter Europe as ‘African art’ (or often under the derogatory category of ‘primitive art’): “when statues die, they enter art”.
The film is plentiful with propositions of different ways to approach relationship dynamics, be that between the ‘subject’ and the lens, between the one behind the lens and the ones in front of it - both of which I’ve touched on -, or between social agents more broadly. The latter comes up when the film introduces us to landscape theory, the idea that every landscape contains a power structure.
This is an interesting precedent for the ending of the film, which focuses on a graveyard (normally a landscape I would consider reflects power structures), but one in which unmarked stones represent the dead buried beneath them, following a philosophy of anonymity. The scene is visually striking, and instantly brought to mind the image of Gabriel Orozco’s Cemetery (2002), a series of photographs of cemetery grounds on a desert landscape in Timbuktu, Mali, scattered with terracotta pots used as grave markers and receptacles for offerings (Rosenzweig and Fineman). As in the Cham stone graveyard, this landscape demonstrates the blurred lines between nature and the process of living and dying, and socio-cultural ritualisations of these processes.
New takes on the idea of landscape also emerge from other films in the festival, including Nguyễn’s own Landscape Series 1, a series of stills screened as physical slides, showing people interacting with their environment. This engagement with the landscape reveals how embodied the act of looking is, as most people pictured are shown pointing at the landscape, thus directing our eyes and socially mediating the experience of the natural panorama.
The connection between the images is left tenuous by the absence of narration, and the film is marked only by the repetitive sound of a projector clicking through the images. Nguyễn writes “I am interested in the idea of landscapes as quiet witnesses to history”.
The idea of landscapes as witnesses is also central to Abdessamad El Montassir’s Galb’Echaouf, part of the festival’s New Cinema Awards section. Set in the Western Sahara, the film focuses on histories of displacement around the conflict between Morocco and Polisario, exploring how a story can be told in a context in which “amnesia has resulted from extreme political circumstances”. Seeking to create a narrative that fills the silences of those who cannot speak of all they’ve endured, El Montassir looked to what he describes as the “non-human knowledge present in plants and landscapes”, “the ruins, the desert, its thorny plants”.
As the narration tells us, “a single plant covers the land of the Sahara, the Daghmous”, which “turned its leaves into spikes and withdrew onto itself”. The film connects this framing of the nature to the experience of people who, similarly to the plants, have “lost their leaves but remained standing”. As scenes show human traces left in the flora and mountain, one is reminded of the mutually constitutive nature of human and non-human agents, and their reciprocal relationship: “an unknown part of us remains in the desert and an unknown part of the desert remains in us”.
Moving on to Tender Point Ruin by Sophia Al-Maria, a film so cool I lack the words to describe it, really. With the description telling me that the film “traverses the gifts, the vulnerabilities and the detritus of art-making” and the opening shot of a lens opening to reveal solar surface explosions, my interest was peaked from the start. The still I included here shows little fragments of material being placed into the opened pocket of vinyl jacket, its texture highlighted by the edited light. Treated like found treasures, these pieces are part of the film’s focus on detritus, making and unmaking.
The theme of landscape and its connection to monuments and power dynamics run through this film as well, here with a particular focus on “ruins, ruinate and ruination”. These terms that are “Jamaican inventions” alluding to reclamation of the land. As explained in the film, the coupling of the words “ruin” and “nation” alludes to how the imposition of ‘nation’ (via colonial rule and monumental impositions on local landscape, in my reading) is overcome by the naturalness of ruin. CGI renderings of future landscapes fill the screen as narration describes the cultivation for “the uncontrollable forest” and states: “when a landscape becomes ruinate, (…) the order of empire is replaced by the chaotic forest”. The film was both mentally and visually engaging, plentiful with theoretical references to follow up on and creative amalgamations of moving and still images, and text. From opening shot to credits (see below), this was like nothing I've ever watched, in the best way possible.
Last by not least is Invisible Touch, a programme of 12 short films shot by Rajee Samarasinghe over the course of a decade, focused on the themes of "migration, memory, and impermanence".
still: The Eyes of Summer
The Eyes of Summer was a highlight in this varied ensemble. It is introduced by the filmmaker: "this film was shot in my mother's village in Southern Sri Lanka, shortly after the civil war in 2010. Collaboratively developed with members of my family there, a narrative was improvised around an investigation into my mother's interactions with spirits in the community during her childhood". The improvised narrative is that of a girl who befriends a spirit, a plot that allows for the film to land "somewhere between horror fiction and 'spectral ethnography'", as the description puts it. The world 'spectral' refers to that which is of or like a ghost, and describes the set of colours into which a beam of light can be separated. Both of these meanings are present in the film, which explores how relationships between the dead and the living take a particular form in this social context, using light to conjure the presence of the intangible.
still: The Spectre Watches Over Her
In The Spectre Watches Over Her, also set in Samarasinghe's mother's village, the theme of social relations with non-living entities continues, this time using different visual strategies and relating the topic to the history of colonialism and ethnographic practices in South Asia. The appearance of this hand-processed film can be seen as another configuration of the metaphysical, in black and white sharply contrasted and abstract-like images rather than 'spectral' light. The absence of sound also differs from the focus on chanting and drumming seen in The Eyes of Summer. This interesting sensorial effect is combined with a fascinating subject matter: the restaging of an exorcism once performed on her in the early 1960s, a 12-hour healing ritual. This initiative is a response to the work of Swiss anthropologist Paul Wirz, and his work on 'Exorcism and the art of healing in Ceylon' [the colonial name for present-day Sri Lanka), thus in direct dialogue with the history of anthropological exercise and its colonial ties.
To follow my last review's ending on a mention to a short film, Samarasinghe's The Queen of Materials was a visual feast in its brief parade of textiles, interspersed with scenes of a young woman being adorned.
When I first reviewed BFMAF, I wrote I was curious to see how my perception of film would change as I 'stray away from my first impressions and more personal, sensory concerns into a more technical approach', hoping I'd 'still maintain that novice excitement'. Now, I'd say getting more knowledge about (ethnographic) film is in no way incompatible with first impressions or sensory concerns - these are the starting point, which some references, debates and vocabularies have made it easier to depart from into a more in-depth analysis. Over these two editions, BFMAF had put a range of new films, filmmakers, modes of filmmaking, theories and visuals onto my radar, and I look forward to the discoveries that will come with the next edition of the festival!
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