Human Rights Film Festivals

Activism in Context

Sonia M. Tascón

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137454249
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Human rights film festivals have been steadily growing in number in recent years. They are all bound by a common thread, human rights, and yet show distinctly different films. What leads them to be so different, and how is the universalism of human rights made sense by each?

Part I

Framings

Introduction1

This book sets out to consider how human rights, films, and film festivals have come together. This will be done specifically in relation to two human rights film festivals, in Buenos Aires and New York. I took on this venture from a purely personal interest, but nothing is ever just personal. It was also a professional interest, as an academic who was teaching both human rights philosophy and media theory at Curtin University in Australia, and at the same time becoming interested in films for activism. When I decided, in 2007, to set up a human rights film festival in Perth, Western Australia, I became involved with a team from Melbourne who had already been organizing this for a year or so. I entered the inside of the whale as it were, and came to realize that establishing a film festival was no easy task. The two women on whose coattails I rode, had done much of the hard work of organizing this from the other side of the country. For this book, I ended up deciding not to focus on the very festival of which I had been a part, for similar reasons to those that led Amnesty International to initially force activists to focus on other people outside their own country: being too close to the material, and personally invested in it, you lose the capacity to say some things (because you do not notice them or you have a direct interest in how and what you say). Also, I wanted to see how others do it, and I could not do justice to the two other festivals I chose by also including the Australian festival. I was especially interested in viewing the history and processes of the first human rights film festival worldwide (the New York Human Rights Watch International Film Festival founded in 1988), and another not from the affluent world, but whose language I could understand. That ended up being the Festival Internacional de Cine de Derechos Humanos (International Human Rights Film Festival), founded in 1997 in Buenos Aires. The decision to choose a film festival that was not part of the affluent world came from questions that originated from my background as a hyphenated hybrid of sorts, living in Australia as an immigrant from Chile and also as an academic teaching media theory and human rights, with a cultural studies/social work background. These foci had led me to develop theoretical and practical orientations toward questions of race, and I began to have vague thoughts about representation and politics, and the politics of representation. This became merged with longer-standing concerns about the implicatedness of human rights in power relationships that formed and circulated at a global level. I was also interested in how they may be used to establish particular worldviews through a system that represented the human as universal (i.e., human rights), but could not help but have fissures in its foundations that were filled in with materials of its time.

Theoretical Frames

The questions about representation and global power relations turned into questions about the use of films to represent certain worldviews and ideologies, and how human rights may be implicated in a system of knowledge that, through being aligned with powerful political forces, has imposed a certain view of “human” on the rest of humanity. A Foucauldian perspective of power-knowledge seemed to be at the heart of the questions I had developed. That theoretical frame focuses on underlying epistemological questions about how we make knowledge; how we do so by a dual process of filtering out, or making some things absent, while at the same time enhancing, or giving presence to, others. But this perspective also highlights power as a set of forces that makes some knowledge more valid than others, and which then influences what we do. This enables certain things to be said (or screened) and others to be left out, according to the rules of the system, many of which are negotiated differently with time and by different people. These rules are intended to preserve a certain relational network, within which are hierarchies that give more visibility and dominance to certain knowledges and people as they come to be invested in these knowledges, and that make others invisible or less visible. Such an approach considers the “already-said,” and the “never-said” (Foucault 1972), which bring something into being as a piece of knowledge and define the boundaries of what may be considered knowledge within them. These pieces of knowledge are reproduced through power relationships that permit and prohibit utterances and practices, and are subject to surveillance and control through institutions (Foucault 1979). For human rights, two terms become the basis of the discourse: human and rights. The first is a heavily loaded idea, on which much philosophical and other scholarly attention has been fixed, but for human rights “the human” can largely be said to be the humanist subject of the Enlightenment (Ife 2010). That subject was brought into being as a set of rights, which in modern times has been configured as legal claims, and has come to be housed in the peak institution of the United Nations (UN). As films were introduced into this discourse, new ways of knowing were given entry. This produces tensions that the discourse must resolve, either through rejection of the new knowledge, subsumption, or modification. The language of the visual is a form of communication that also follows a particular logic, one that “constrains—but also enables—writing, speaking and thinking within . . . specific historical limits” (McHoul and Grace 1993, 31). I would add “looking” to that quote. As human rights and films come together they “come to mean, [and] become intelligible” (Chouliaraki 2004, 185) to a viewer concerned about humanitarian issues.

By bringing together two systems of meaning—human rights and the visual—but more specifically as the visual has been constructed through films, they come to mean something new, but are also an extension of each of these ways of writing, speaking, and seeing the world. As films of a certain kind are brought together to represent human rights, they are being asked to make meaning in a particular way, in a manner that in another context—that is, not human rights—would produce different meanings. This is further enhanced when they are positioned in a film festival. To add to that complexity, the histories of each of these three elements—human rights, films, and film festivals—bring their own set of developments, interrogations, orientations, and prestanding demands; what has gone before cannot help but influence how this new territory is being built. The turn to some of the histories involved, which the reader will find in this book, is also informed by a Foucauldian approach, which is a search for origins in knowledge formation. Michel Foucault would call this archaeology of knowledge (1972). Although, of course, what constitutes an origin is always uncertain, in this study three distinct areas are easily recognizable: human rights, films, and film festivals.

Human Rights

For human rights, I realized that much of its discursive history is heavily weighted as a history of the West, as European and American struggles to loosen the grips of kingly power. My definition of the originary moment of their full modern expression, recognizable in the institutionalized form that they now have, goes as far back as the American and French Revolutions. Why I do so is explained in chapter 1, so I will not say anymore here. Those origins, which essentially were revolutionary moments, established human rights discursively as a search for the manifestation of “being human” in political activities that were asserting forms of freedom from authoritarian power. This can help explain the initial and contemporary focus on civil and political rights that I discuss further below. In their present-day shape, however, as they developed out of events from World War II, human rights became a way of reestablishing, or conserving, an old order, a turn away from the totalitarianism of fascism and communism, and distinct from what had taken place with the two revolutions. Their discursive power was intensified after that war through the use of a language that was to give them greater validity: the legal. These two key discursive developments—the attention given to civil and political events, and legal language—have been further overlaid by a principle that shows these orientations to be “natural” by being universal.

The concept of universality, an idea that humanity was one, endorsed the kinds of rights that would be drawn up as transferable across geographical and cultural differences, to provide a framework for claiming to be human. The idealized, abstracted subject of universality in fact represented no one (or perhaps a reduced few), while attempting to represent everyone, and needed to be reflected in its practical manifestation through contextualized structures such as the nation-state. This reduced the claim of universality concerning these rights considerably. The most extensive reach they have managed, therefore, is to be “internationalist,” or to enter into other subjectivities as they are configured and regulated through the cultural, social, and political structures of the nation. Even while we may consider new forms of multiple subjectivities in the age of increased travel and communications, human rights are conceived as embedded in their practice through the nation-state. Universality, however, becomes an idealized orientation, which formulates as a discursive mandate to “look out” beyond our own borders of belonging. As universality is an organizing principle, which is manifest as an internationalization, it became one of the frames through which I looked at the festivals: to discover the degree to which the internationalizing impulse of human rights influences festival programming, as a “looking out.” But the degree to which the looking out has to be composed through a viewer who is invested in a set of locally arranged looking relations, or viewing traditions, it ends up manifesting as a looking out that may end up being a looking in, instead. I consider this through context chapters that take into account local events to more fully understand how the looking out is being configured. Although the looking out has dimensions of looking in, I do not use the term “looking in” for this phenomenon, but for an actual orientation of looking at others beyond each festival’s own national borders (see more on this below).

The “looking out” that human rights seeks is, in terms of images, also embroiled in a discursive regime, and this has been negotiated through a set of looking relations that I have called the humanitarian gaze. This way of looking is organized by a relationship of unequal power premised on humanitarianism, a discourse that shows some to be (persistent) victims, and others as aiding them. This then predisposes the privileged that aid them to seek “others” as figures of pity or, at best, as fighters to be “more like us.” But it will also seek to find an effective self projected on screen. I discuss this more fully in chapter 2.

Films

As films are brought together in a film festival, elements of their discursive frame are brought to bear. As many of the films that appear in a human rights film festival (referred to hereafter as HRFF) are documentaries, questions arise immediately as to why this may be so. Documentary films are perceived as having a closer relationship to the reality of “the protagonist of life” (Getino and Solanas 1969), and film scholars have pondered this question substantially, some through political frames, and others through phenomenological approaches. I will include these discussions throughout the book as the need arises. Another set of questions that emerges from the use of films and documentaries has to do with truth telling. As films are being included as part of the activist repertoire of human rights, they are imbricated within the discursive regime of human rights, and expected to embody similar truth-telling regimes. As I discuss in chapter 1, traditionally this regime has been formulated by legal language and knowledge. Legal knowledges’ truth regimes are highly specific, and follow an evidentiary and testimonial logic, and an adversarial process that is intended to produce a right/wrong, or guilty/innocent reply, which films only partially fulfill. As cultural artifacts and creative texts, films align closer to the messiness of everyday life, and do not follow those principles for truth telling, even within documentary films. This does not mean that they lie, but rather that they reveal for us aspects of a story that will be hidden by other forms of evidence gathering, and these must be seen as informing us (often by complicating the question and interrogating us rather than providing answers) and not implicating us in a final judgment. I would go as far as to suggest that although truth telling within legal processes appears to tell the truth, it only tells a truth, and that all we do is storied, even in telling the “truth” in a legal court. That is, although we accept certain forms of truth, it is only so because we have accepted the frameworks (the story or discourse) under which truth may be told. The legal framework has been formulated through a long historical battle to understand the claims of opposing parties and to divest that system from the partisan interests of one person, and this is what has resulted. But these are debates best left to law philosophers.

Films act for different reasons. And films, I contend, have a responsibility. Walter Benjamin, writing about films in the early twentieth century said that they open up vistas previously unseen. I provide a lengthy passage from his writings because it is one of the most lyrical descriptions of film I have ever read:

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. (1936)

Film, he suggests lets us see our world anew and differently, but also to see parts of that world we never noticed before. Because they change our perceptions of things and direct our attention toward newness that has an effect on us, they have a responsibility. Different filmmaking traditions will formulate this responsibility variously, in relation to how films (should) relate to their viewers. For example, Third Cinema, as I will cover more extensively in Section I particularly, suggests that films’ very form has a responsibility to engage the viewer in dialogue. To this end, La Hora De Los Hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (Getino and Solanas 1969) was made as a four-hour film divided by distinct sections intended to permit the cessation of viewing for reflection and discussion. Costa-Gavras questioned the accepted reliance by political filmmakers on the documentary, and the tendency of the radical political tradition to focus on structural issues and not personal stories. His oeuvre, produced from the 1970s to today, has been called the fictionalization of politics and a way of engaging the viewer on political issues in a manner not seen in any explicit way before him. The question of the political and ethical dimensions of film is a complex one, and I cover some of that in later chapters, so will not say much here except to note the important suggestion by some scholars that all film is political (Cineaste Eds. 2011b). In Argentina, this topic became a particularly significant one as its national cinema was virtually annihilated by the dictatorship of 1976, and this affected mostly the nation’s ability to tell its own political stories. As its political cinema had been encased within its national cinema, it was that strand of cinema that was most affected, and this led to some soul searching for postdictatorship film scholars as to the nature of the political in films. As to films’ ethical responsibility, Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton in Film and Ethics (2010) propose that all films are infused with ethics. Films, they state, are constructed within a moral framework, deploying notions of virtue both to unfold and resolve the narrative. Films’ ethical impulse is not an issue to which I give extensive or explicit attention, as others have done this better than myself (Downing and Saxton 2010; Hesford 2011), even in relation to human rights visual material. Insofar as films will always be imbricated within the world of what Third Cinema called “the protagonist of life” (1969), or people, these politico-ethical questions will continue to be asked of them.

Film Festivals

It is when films are asked to serve human rights purposes that they become embroiled in a specific set of demands, some political, some ethical. While they may be asked to illustrate something about the human condition that coincides with the rights discourse, they are also making changes to that discourse by extending its frame. Some of this book is about that. But it is mostly about film festivals, as it is when films are located for screening within a film festival that they gain the layer of complexity that I am focusing on here. Film festivals, I argue, are adding an extra level to the discursive complexity, because these sites of exhibition have a history and development of their own. Film festivals originated in Europe in the first third of the twentieth century to subvert the dominance of Hollywood and provide alternative exhibition spaces for fledgling national cinemas. In that way they have been places of organized unruliness. In recent times, they have been organized by a different discursive principle, that of cinephilia, which places newness, and film as an art form for its own sake, at its center. They have also become a means to put a nation or city on display rather than just its national cinema per se. As I will discuss more fully in chapter 2, film festivals ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Framings
• Part II Festival Internacional de Cine Derechos Humanos, Buenos Aires
• Part III Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, New York
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Film Index (by Film Title)
• Index