New Found-footage films
Two new films are almost exclusively assembled from archival images: Vanessa Lapas “The Decent” and Göran Hugo Olsson’s ” Concerning Violence “.
The two possible different films at issue here have one thing in common: They operate from the historic moving image archive more than a hundred years reaching back. So take advantage of the cinema not as an apparatus that records a present reality, whether in documentary or intention to produce feature film fictions.
do not engage, but to. You arrange “found footage”, so found moving image material. This is in times of digital databases and easily accessible image archives much more tangible, but so also vulnerable to the random access than before. The experimental film made from dealing with image archive material an art which is called found footage film. Where the art is often to attempt to summon by sampling new neighborhoods and associations and to free the footage so from his old contexts in new.
No art and no exemption is, however, if you’re like Vanessa Lapa moves. Her film “The Decent” is not a Fund is based, but initially in moving image archives. In 2007 Lapas father had bought private letters, photographs and other documents from the estate of Heinrich Himmler. American soldiers had let this go with out of the vault in Himmler’s villa at the end of the war; they were, no one knows how, into the hands of a living in Tel Aviv man named Chaim Rosenthal. They already tried to sell in the eighties (which was not a good time, Kujau had just written Hitler diaries), but it was only in 2007, then release.
Vanessa Lapa is grown in Belgium and since 1995 living in Israel granddaughter of Holocaust victims. She has long turned Reports for Israeli television and became well known with a documentary on the then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. She decided to treat the acquired material from her father in a documentary.
function in the machinery of destruction
Excerpts from the letters could be in winter in the world in Sunday read already, a nice attention Coup for the film in the Panorama section of the Berlinale experienced soon after its premiere. For historians, the private material is hardly relevant, Himmler function in the machinery of destruction of the “Third Reich”, about his actions as “Reichsführer-SS” and Holocaust architect we learn nothing new in it.
The letters he (still one tough Nazisse) alternates with his wife and especially the adolescent daughter Gudrun, rather are of utmost banality, without having the on the banality evil learned some interesting things. For you must know that Himmler (“Your Heini”) and his wife Marga in their relationship like himself as “evil” imagined when she writes about, “I’m so happy to have such a good bad man his angry wife loves so much as him “.
The good bad man who later betrayed the evil woman with a younger woman, but at least he was doing, unlike the Holocaust, a guilty conscience. But should we care? And worse still: What is Vanessa Lapa with this find! It has stirred the letters, photos and all sorts of other mainly taken from all sorts of archives images to a hard edible stew.
You asked a single image, not a single sentence, she brings the images, the sets, the sounds do not talk to each other, but it has, as it says in the press release, the material “come to life”. Yes, thank you very much also: Heini lives. Part of the revival that professionals must speak the text, Sophie Rois and Tobias Moretti borrow Henry and Marga their voices.
Unterscheidlos strung together
Lapa their ranks very different material very indiscriminately together, in addition to the photos there are from contexts broken film snippets of a cheerful game in the garden, Christmas Tree Pictures and Images NS-physical education and war and concentration camp corpses.
Whether propaganda, whether feature film, whether documentation – you will not know where all this comes from, it is not dated, it’s all just short in the picture will zoom associated brutally ans recited letter material than mere illustration in the service of a generous leveled Himmlerbilds that all differences blurred in the collage. Found footage here means only: self-service from the moving image archive.
On the other Case: Göran Hugo Olsson’s also “Concerning Violence” constellated found footage with a text. The relationship between text and image is, however, less clear, pure illustration is not, in any case. The text: Frantz Fanon as canonically as to today’s controversial anti-colonial classic “The Wretched of the Earth”.
Fanon, born in 1925, came from Martinique, was a pupil of the writer, politician and negritude-thinker Aimé Césaire, fought for France during the war, studied medicine and philosophy in Lyon, got a job as head of a psychiatric hospital in Algeria, resigned from that and became a leading figure in the fight of the National Liberation Front in Algeria.
violence as a means in the resistance
“The Wretched of the Earth” Fanon, leukemia, written in the last months of his short life. He turns it radically to the side of the colonized. The book developed from the practice of colonization and the struggle against it a theory of revolution and yes, this is the scandal, specifically the violence as a means of resistance. Also Olsson, the question of violence, as the title suggests, the center of the film. He leaves Fanon doing quite the word, the text that you hear is completely out of the book.
As Vanessa Lapa he can speak to him of a prominent figure, only the choice is much more interesting: We hear the voice of the black musician and actress Lauryn Hill, just with a comeback attempt headlines makes. Fanon’s text is not only spoken, printed in large white letters and Olsson pushes the Spoken parallel also in the picture.
And this is – with the exception of the preface – from found-footage material that comes from Swedish television reports. Similarly, Olsson was already in “Black Power Mix Tape” method, the film about the radical black anti-racism movement in the United States, who has made him known. The images that you see in “Concerning Violence” are created from 1966 to 1987, show liberation fighters in Mozambique, dumb missionaries in Tanzania, one then still reasonable-sounding Robert Mugabe, mutilated victims, a strike of black coal miners, and many others.
Divides the film in nine chapters, in the aforementioned preface sits the thought leader of the postcolonial studies, Gayatri Spivak, in her office and emphasizes the importance Fanon. The lack of gender perspective she complains. That’s the only explanation that you get.
Fanon’s affirmation
On the rest for myself even a rhyme. Very easy is not it. The material is selected and mounted so that the film showing off whites and blacks to have their say. Fanon’s affirmation of violence is as it seems, affirmed. Is still to be seen on the displayed year figures, marks the historical distance to the material shown at any point. It appears as agitprop, which pulls the struggles of a different time in the present.
The handling of the material is quite authoritarian, it should show what Lauryn Hills Fanon says. However, it speaks, speak the men and women in it, over and over again for themselves. And secondly, also raises the agitation assembly of images and sound, and Fanon’s writing to date provocative manifesto resistors from front to back. The difference with “The Decent” is this: Here, the resistance due to the aesthetic facture of the film itself is alive. When Vanessa Lapa only Heinrich Himmler comes to life on fundamentally false way.
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