Art under occupation: documentary, archive, and the radically banal.

Artists are emerging from the atrophied, censorious Saddam years, from the distortions of taste provoked by state patronage and control and the horizons foreshortened by sanctions, and are beginning to document what is around them.

--Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (1)

... ideological struggle and political change follow from changes of habit that art, and the art of documentary can provoke.

--Bill Nichols (2)

"Art under occupation is a matter of survival," asserts Maysoon Pachachi, co-founder- of the Independent Film & Television College (IFTC) in Baghdad, Iraq. "The world is being fragmented and unmade, and you need a way to think about what is going on, using the camera as a means of discovery. You then put the images together to construct something from the shards of experience." (3) Art, in this case, is not a luxury, a leisure-time pursuit, or a reaction to complex philosophical or art-historical questions that have little to do with lived reality. In a world that has become fragmented and violent, this art functions as a means of survival. It reformulates the nature of viewing, memory, and archival logic through the self-representation of everyday people, places, and events. These representations engender anomic archives, counter to "official" historical archives and narratives that preserve, in memory, the everyday human subject ensnared within the life-atrophying conjunction of occupation and geo-political struggle. "Mnemonic desire," argues Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "is activated especially in those moments of extreme duress in which the traditional material bonds among subjects, between subjects and objects, and between objects and their representation appear to be on the verge of displacement, if not outright disappearance." (4) This art, taking the form of documentary filmmaking, offers a space to reflect, create, remake, and document.

When "superpowers" such as the United States have curbed the market on the spectacular, catastrophic visuality (5) of shock and awe, it is easy to forget the individual, human lives so adversely and irreversibly affected by the destructive rationality inherent in modern warfare. When the churning of official histories produces meta-discourses of warfare and the nobility of empty notions such as "freedom" and "democracy" are smoothed and fit into neat modes, the self-representation of the everyday citizen becomes a quiet, yet powerful, affirmative gesture. Such gestures, when archived on film and video, preserve a collage of real lives and real affects for the world to view. The films and videos analyzed in this article would not normally be characterized as "radical." They are utterly banal in their content and form. This does not de-radicalize the gesture contained in their very production, however namely, the assertion of a subdued yet uncompromising humanity in the face of near total destruction. As Ranajit Guha argues, "the noise of world history and its statist concerns has made historiography insensitive to the sighs and whispers of everyday life." (6) These videos foreground the "sighs and whispers" Guha alludes to within a representation of the everyday as a form of witnessing and testimony of life under occupation. This article lays the groundwork for thinking about this documentary practice in regard to archival logic and theory. It also offers a speculative analysis of the radically banal aspects of two Iraqi student films, Hiwar (2005, directed by Kifaya Saleh) and Let The Show Begin (2005, directed by Dhafir Taleb) in regard to counter-archival logic and the radical documentary tradition. Both have been widely screened in festivals and other venues throughout the world (7) and were two of four Iraqi student films appended to the worldwide DVD release of James Longley's Iraq in Fragments (2006). Ultimately, I wish to argue that banality, a reaction against the exploitative function of what Jill Godmilow has termed "the pornography of the real," (8) can serve a radical, affirming potential.

THE IFTC: TRANSMISSIBILITY AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

In 2004, Kasim Abid and Maysoon Pachachi. two independent Iraqi filmmakers who had been living in the United Kingdom, returned to Iraq to found the IFTC. The college is a free of charge, nonprofit training center for burgeoning Iraqi independent filmmakers that provides access to training, support, and production facilities for the creation of documentary films and videos. As Abid and Pachachi contend, "film and television can be powerful tools in the reconstruction of a shattered society and contribute to the redefining and renewal of a national culture. They provide a way for a society to look at itself, to question its history, and to consider its future. And they also provide a way for one section of society to talk to another." (9) This high degree of transmissibility allows a confluence of intersubjective and intertextual cultural productions that help to form new spaces of interaction as well as new "public domains," spaces of resistance and interetural communication outside the boundaries of any official state apparatus. In this milieu, a vast archive of bodies and spaces accumulates as the historical is revealed through dynamic, multivalent images and stories. Historiography dislocates as a space emerges for transnational testimony and witnessing. The films considered here were shot during the end of 2004 through October 2005. This period brought with it the first democratic elections in Iraq (January 2005) as well as a referendum on the new constitution (October 2005). The films reflect a mixture of tension, hope, and skepticism of the place of the Iraqi citizen and Iraqi culture in the construction of a "new" Iraq.

THE ARCHIVE: RUIN, RECONSTRUCTION, AND RECONSIDERATION

On April 10 and 12, 2003, the Iraq National Library and Archive (INLA) was severely looted and burned. Saad Eskander, the current director of the INLA, estimates that 60% or more of the collections were stolen, burned, or otherwise destroyed: "Within the space of three days, the Iraq .National Library and Archive lost a large portion of Iraq's historical memory. Hundreds of thousands of archival documents, historical records, and rare books were lost forever." (10) During the reign of Saddam Hussein, the INLA became simply a means of legitimizing the totalitarian state. As Eskander argues, "the Ba'ath regime was backward and anti-modernist in its political, social, and cultural orientations. It opposed and abhorred multiculturalism, multi-ethnicity, peaceful coexistence, and solidarity among the nations. Culture and education [were] subjected to ideological needs ..."(1) The "official" state archive is currently being reconstructed in an effort to both provide an account of Iraq's past history and foment support for emerging values.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The status of the archive as a site of historical memory, official repository, and material practice to legitimize the state within a metaphorical site of power has come under scrutiny by various critics. For Michel Foucault, the archive is not a meta-discourse, nor is it the institution itself or the collection of documents attesting to narratives of state power and national values. It is polyvalent and specific; the law of what can be said. He stresses the importance of the incomplete fragments and traces of history, an idea that de-centers the locus of the archive. This de-centering of the archive begets a de-centered subjectivity. In this unstable position, we stand within the ever-emerging, dynamic archive in a place of difference, rather than in a stable position before a linear and continuous mode of history. (12)For Jacques Derrida, the compulsion to collect and store in the face of an ever-receding memory and ultimately death (the death drive in Freud), is a pathology he names "archive fever" (le mat d archive). The compulsion is not merely a will to compile and store as an accumulation of the past, but, Derrida argues, encompasses a desire or promise for a futurity based on the accumulation. If Foucault's account of the archive is a consideration of the "law" and the limits set forth by regulatory mechanisms, Derrida posits the failure of regulations and rearticulates the ethical dimension of hermeneutics in rewriting history within a disjointed concept of the archive. In this anarchic scene of impressions and ever-receding memory, "the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory." (13) As in Foucault, power manifests itself in control of the archive. As Derrida argues, "there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory." (14)

When various artistic practices, which are not part of the officially sanctioned historical memory, proliferate, they help to engender new archives that are anomic or imaginary. These archives re-articulate memory and political power in a new modality, one that accounts for excised images and narratives in a new, unregulated system of legitimation. As Tess Takahashi argues, "these imaginary archives often envision unrecorded pasts, product: other means of legitimizing information, make old systems signify differently, and imagine as yet undetermined futures through the evocation of everyday personal experiences of suffering, displacement and loss." (15) The emphasis on the personal experiences of the everyday gestures toward a mode of self-archivization, a recording of one's experiences that relays the visceral within a specific space and temporality. The production of individual stories, revolving around specific lives or local events, works to represent the subject within a transmissible, visual mode an archival trace of history that clicits the response of others.

Kifaya Saleh's short documentary Hiwar (2005) focuses on the Hiwar Center in Baghdad and its founder, artist Kasim Sebti. The film literalizes the tensions between history, archive, and memory by combining interviews, archival photographs, and direct cinema-style shots of the center to portray the complexity and necessity of art under occupation. The center was founded in 1992 as a meeting place for artists and intellectuals and as a makeshift gallery for the artists to display their work. As Dr. Hamoody Jasim, a patron of the center, asserts, "in the 1990s the Hiwar Center was a lung through which intellectuals could breathe. Writers and painters met there and it was the first gallery to encourage Iraqi art." Besides being a gallery, the center serves as an informal archival storehouse for a range of Iraqi artworks. In an early sequence, we witness Sebti as he moves through a series of small rooms that contain row upon row of artworks in different mediums. In voice-over, Sebti informs us that the center has "a storehouse of sculptures, paintings, and other works--the work of professional artists and work by younger artists which deserves attention, so we hold an exhibition almost every month." All in all, the center holds about four-hundred works in various mediums from the pioneers of Iraqi art to the works of the newest and youngest artists on the scene.

In the most striking sequence of the short video, we view Sebti sitting among a pile of scraps of paper and refuse as he is measuring a piece of cardboard. In voice-over, Sebti comments that Iraqis thought the Iraq-Iran war would only last for two years, but it went on for eight. "So," he says, "I began to see my role as a social one." After a cut to a close-up of his face, he asserts, "I was a witness." The role invoked by Sebti, as a witness giving testimony, rearticulates his place as a subject who is able to speak for those who cannot. As Giorgio Agamben argues in regard to Foucault's archival logic, "the archive's constitution presupposed the bracketing of the subject ... [and] was founded on the subject's disappearance into the anonymous murmur of statements. In testimony ... the empty place of the subject becomes the decisive question." (16)

This testimony occurs in a new space "outside the archive and the corpus of what has already been said." (17) After a series of quick cuts to Sebti's hands as they manipulate the pages and scraps around him, we are confronted with a medium shot of Sebti sitting behind the large pile. As the narrative moves into the present situation, Sebti invokes the burning of the libraries and archives in Baghdad, which provoked his current project: "My most recent work came out of my seeing the library of the Fine Arts Institute burning in front of my eyes." As the camera pans, in close up, revealing the piles of book covers, text, and scraps that litter the small room. Sebti describes his most recent project: "I started thinking about it all. These books, which had been shredded could be used to make art ... I used covers of old books which had been trodden underfoot or burned--the result was an unusual artwork." The next cut is to a medium shot of two pieces hanging on the wall in the gallery. One piece is a make-shift human creature and the other is a relief collage in a frame. Both works are made from an amalgam of brown cardboard ripped, glued, and expropriated. Sebti calls this project "The Mask of the Text" where he suggests that the:

  ... book jackets, which used to cover these texts, are a kind of mask
  concealing a great deal ... the cover became the end product while
  the text remained under my feel, because I don't believe in a text,
  which cannot protect itself. The cover speaks of our bitter
  experience. It is a witness to the intentional burning of our
  libraries and cultural centers.

Sebti not only enunciates his testimony outside of the archive and the corpus of what has been said, he literally uses the material of the archive to create new works of art while discarding the "what has been said" in the form of the pages of text as valueless--a transformative and productive re-appropriation of the archival form and logic. The film concludes with shots of various people reconstructing the Hiwar Center, which was bombed in 2004. An intertitle informs us that the Center received a grant from International Relief and Development to rebuild. The final shots show brick being laid, walls being knocked down, and beams being restored. We are left with hope in renewal and creation.

DISLOCATED HISTORIOGRAPHY: WRITING HISTORY THROUGH DOCUMENTARY

In Convolute N of The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin posits a reconsideration of the historiographic project, arguing for (and demonstrating in his writing technique) a montage approach to history. Benjamin's historical materialist approach provides for new angles of vision to counter rational, linear, positivist progression; an approach consistent with an emerging, irruptive, and transformative view of historical reality. (18) In film history, the concept of montage first emerges from Soviet radical film editing and filmmaking practices. Among its main tenets, and intimately tied to the intervention of the camera into everyday life is Dziga Vertov's conception of the "Kino-Eye." Here a notion of truth is achieved via the cinematic apparatus through its conquest and collapse of space and time and its visual linkage between bodies. The singularity of the Kino-Eye endows the individual filmmaker with an extraordinary power to both represent and erupt the present moment. " The movie camera," Vertov contends, "was invented in order to penetrate deeper into the visible world, to explore and record visual phenomenon, so that we do not forget what happens and what the future must take into account." (19) When multiple filmmakers represent themselves and their reactions to a singular event, we are confronted by a plethora of images, subjectivities, bodies, and approaches. This visual linkage between bodies, in a collision of images, radically alters the linearity of history, creating a montage of multivalent perspectives patched together within different moments in time and across various spaces. In stark contrast to the reports of much of the western media and governments, this approach offers a space for the pain and suffering of the event to come to life--within a foregrounding of the present. The montage approach de-centers the myth of linear progress and historical concepts of temporality. This anti-epistemological concept of history allows for the stories and lives of the vanquished to be illuminated and heard. In this new historiographic form, history is constructed from the ruins, the stray fragments left in the wake of destruction, not simply watched from afar in the reconstructive space of the state archive.

Let the Show Begin portrays the behind-the-scenes preparations for the first Iraq Short Film Festival, which took place on September 28, 2005, inside the Magic Lantern children's theater in Baghdad. The idea for the festival came from discussions among the loose collection of two hundred and fifty artists that comprise the Contemporary Visual Arts Society (CVAS) in Baghdad and was spearheaded by the president of the society, Nizar Al-Rawi, a graphic designer and art critic. The film opens with tracking shots (shot through the dirty window of a car) of street scenes marked by smoldering piles of refuse and disorder. As we confront these images, the setting for the festival is explained in voice-over: "We're putting on this festival in the middle of a war. Baghdad is like the trenches; barbed wire everywhere and curfews--or an explosion and everyone crouches behind sandbags." These scenes of war and its unpredictability, violence, and constraints on the lives of those living in its midst, are sharply contrasted by the next shot of a car pulling into a gated building, the site of the upcoming festival. Contrary to the destruction and disorder witnessed on the street, the secure building offers a site for creation and construction. In the next sequence, the electricity (powered by a diesel generator) begins to flow, as evidenced by the sudden illumination of a fluorescent light. Following this, we meet a series of unnamed workers who are responsible for design, photo restoration, and translation. All are shown performing the jobs they describe in voice-over, with emphasis on the materiality of their occupations. The photo restorer is shown at his computer, digitally retouching a series of photographs documenting the cinema of Iraq from the 1940s through the 1970s, followed by a close-up of a restored production still. The poster and leaflet designer is shown in his workshop, printing, cutting, and producing. In the next sequence, a man affixes a row of the aforementioned posters to a brick wall in Baghdad. In voice-over, one of the artists notes the objections to the festival: "People say, 'What are you doing at a time like this? Iraq's in political crisis with no security, this isn't the time for culture.'" As the voice-over continues, a shot of two men working to crect the main screen in the auditorium at the Magic Lantern is inter-cut into the sequence. The voice-over continues: "We don't agree--if you have something to offer, this is precisely the right time to do it, this moment of such political upheaval." The inter-cutting of the shot of the screen being erected in the midst of this rebuttal to critics is particularly apt. It connotes both a screening out of the trauma of living in the midst of a war zone while also providing a material object for creativity, hope, and culture to be projected upon. The screen offers the promise of both temporary relief and the possibility of cultural renewal amidst upheaval--an inscription of a new form of history. The screen also functions as a locus for the community to literally come together.

The five days of the festival are portrayed through a series of shots of audience members filing into the auditorium and mingling among the restored photos of Iraq's cinematic history. These shots are intercut by two montages of brief moments from many of the fifty-eight films screened at the festival. The images shown in the montages run the gamut from explosions, people in the street, helicopters overhead, and children playing in ruined buildings to men fishing, an animated sequence of a boy with a ball, and a doctor wearing a gas mask. An elderly Iraqi artist comments, "we spent all our lives dreaming, not really hoping. We used to dream that we'd realize something, be able to do something." The montage sequence, though a common trope used on the film festival circuit, takes on more profound significance when contextualized within the current turmoil in Iraq. It is an act of archiving the new images of the present. It also gestures toward a new form of historiography, one culled from the multiple visual fragments of a society in transition. This mode of historiography, premised on irruptions and fragments, reorients vision and possibility, engendering a new, unbounded logic of possibility and agency--the promise that we "can do something" instead of simply dreaming.

WITNESS, TESTIMONY, PUBLIC DOMAIN

As counter-historical, archival memories, these films certainly function on a political register, especially in their depiction of the everyday lives, events, and places inhabited by Iraqi citizens. This depiction implicates the viewer in witnessing, enabling a perspective and experience that would otherwise be denied them, and alterity that allows for reflection, engagement, and the formation of human connection. This reciprocity of witnessing is premised on the realism brought forth by the representation of the everyday and other images that invoke the banal, the ordinary, the "real." As Bill Nichols argues, "realism aids and abets empathy" and is "a form of visual historiography." (20) Realism works two ways in the political dimension: first, the portrayal of real bodies, mimetically reproduced before us, is an act of production and representation that allows for both the affective engagement and involvement of the viewer. This experiential form is reinforced through a presentation of typicality. As Nichols argues:

  To experience is to become involved. Experience provides the ground
  for knowledge and ideology. Typicality ... the affective engagement
  of the viewer with social tensions and pleasures, conflicts and
  values--move the viewer away from the status of observer toward that
  of participant. Something is at stake. Namely our very subjectivity
  within the social arena. The move beyond observation to experience
  ... opens up a space for contestation. (21)

This space of contestation, a subjectivity engendered by participation, is premised on a political type of phenomenology that begets "a recognition of the priority of experience as the social ground for foundation for actual praxis. Central to this question is our experience of the body. Documentary film insists on the presence of the body." (22)

The body, in this case, must be animated to be represented, not merely a photographic likeness. The presence of the body allows for a counter archive of experiences, an intersubjective, intertextual quilt of material presence--a visual document that is viscerally engaging in its subjective intensity. The presence of the body also lends vitality and individuation to the visual historiography, which defines the second dimension of the effect of realism in this political dimension. "The text locates on the person of its subjects," Nichols argues, "the tensions, conflicts, contradictions, and paradoxes of a historical moment, making them real, as though for the first time, because they are rendered with a specificity they never had before." (23) This location of the complexity of the historical moment, in and among the subjects (bodies) of documentaries, grounds the paradoxes of historiography and competing claims, projecting them on the body and allowing for an experience of the real premised on the experience of affect. This reciprocity of witnessing, then, implicates the viewer in the experience of the event presented and begets an alterity endowed with an ethical concern and a provocation toward the political.

Realism, imagined and deployed in this way, must be reclaimed from the endless debates and critiques in documentary theory and asserted as vitally important to our current historical moment. The very material of the documentary film--its subject, its images, and its power--rely on a radical tradition not found in other forms of filmmaking or artistic practice. Documentary, as Jane Gaines contends, "uses the world to transform the world." (24) Documentary filmmakers occupy a unique and strategic position within the on-the-ground realities of the present historical moment. "Documentary makers are positioned is such a way that they see, with their attention to everyday life, things coming unraveled ... where the probe of the contradiction then may be performed by ordinary people ..." (25) This new collection of banal images, stories, and lives represented form new types of visual archives and new spaces of resistance.

Patricia Zimmerman names these emerging spaces of resistance "public domains." She reformulates the term "public domain" from one of juridical or proprietary connotations to one that is "more plural and beyond an exclusive focus on the fixity of the image and the artifact." (26) Public domain, in this expropriated mode, revolves chiefly around the concept and practice of an inclusive and collaborative heterogeneity that "activate[s] new ways of thinking, acting and connecting with others"--in other words, a space that allows for the creation of new publics. (27) Here, the liminal space of the ordinary person is re-imagined and recuperated. Especially in the context of Iraq, the restorative aspect of public domain rests in the idea that it is a place where "ideas and exploring new vectors and relationships replace panic, amnesia and anesthesia" --symptoms directly induced by the spectacle of shock and awe. (28)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

During this war, documentary film and video have emerged in a new mode self-representations of the affects of war on the occupied. The radically banal images of witness and testimony represented in the documentary films and videos produced by Iraqi citizens help to create anomic, imaginary archives. The archives re-imagine the process of historiography and hermeneutics from the ground up. In addition, through their worldwide circulation, these films help to engender new public domains. We can only hope that in the near future, such films and videos will emerge when the whispers of war first begin. These visual documents would foster pre-war irruptive spaces of democratic sociability outside the state and media apparatuses. Spurred by the near immediacy of distributive technologies, the public domains fostered may be able to give the citizens of western nations pause as they see human beings, individuals much like themselves, attempting to live their lives peacefully. Hopefully, such representations would fuel anti-war efforts and help to halt the war machine of American political and media discourses. (29)

RYAN WATSON is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of lowa. His last article appeared in the Journal of Film and Video.

NOTES (1.) From his article "Art Under Fire" in The Guardian (UK). Number 22, 2001. (2.) Bill Nichols. Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 194.(3.) Anne Ashford, "Iraq: Filmmaking Under Occupation (Interview with Maysoon Pachadu)," Socialist Review (July 2006),were.socialistreview.org.uk/ (accessed February 14, 2008). (4.) Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Gerhard Richter's 'Atlas': The Anomic Archive," October 88 (Spring 1999), 137.(5.) I am adapting this term from Akira Mizuta Lippit and his notion of "catastrophic light." See Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light: Shadow Optics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesola Press, 2005). (6.) Ranajit Guha. History at the Limit of World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 22. (7.) These international festivals include the UN Association Film Festival, London; Augsburg Film Festival, Germany; Women's Film Festival, Seoul. South Korea; Iraqi Fihn Festival, Den Haag, Netherlands; International Festival of Human Rights, Geneva, Switzerland; Oxdox Documentary International Film Festival, Oxford United Kingdom and the Arab Film Festival, San Francisco, CA. See also the official site for the IFTC for a full list of films: www.iftec.org. (8.) See Jill Godmilow's What Farocki Taught (1997). This is a phrase Godmilow uses in her explanation of why she feels Harun Farocki's Inextinguishable Fire (1969) is such an important anti-war film and why she chose to re-make it. Sometimes the most radical gesture is not to simply engage in the spectacle of destroyed bodies. As Farocki's film opens: "When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you'll shut your eyes. You'll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you'll close them to the memory. And then you'll close your eyes to the facts." (Ed. note: See elsewhere in this issue for a review of the catalog for Farocki's exhibition "one image doesn't take the place of the previous one."/ (9.) See www.ifwe.org/about.htm. (10.) Saad Eskander, keynote speech at the Internet Librarian International 2004 conference held in London Oct. 10-12; www.iraqnla.org/fp/art/art6.hum (accessed Feb. 15, 2008). (11.) Ibid. (12.) Michel Foucault, The Archacology of Knowledge, Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York: Panthean, 1972). (13.) Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, Eric Prenowitz, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 11. (14.) Ibid., 4 (note 1). (15.) Tess Takahashi, "The Imaginary Archive: Current Practice, "Caunera Obscura 66 Vol. 22, no. 3 (2007), 180. (16.) Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Daniel Heller-Roazen trans. (New York: Zone Books, 1999). 145. (17.) Ibid., 161. (18.) See Walter Benjamin "Canvolute. N |On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress|" in The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 460. (19.) Dziga Vetov, "Kino-Eye," in Kino Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Annette Michelson, ed., Kevin O'Brien, trans, (Berkeley University of California Press 1984), 67. (20.) Nichols. Representing Reality, 172, 177. (21.) Ibid., 194. (22.) Ibid., 232. (23.) Ibid., 236. (24.) Jane M. Gaines, "The Production of Ontrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition, " Framework 48.2 (Fall 2007), 46. (25.) Ibid., 47. (26.) Patricia Zimmerman, "Public Domains: Engaging Iraq Through Experinnental Digitalities," Framework 48.2 (Fall 2007), 66. (27.) Ibid., 67. (28.) Ibid., 72. (29.) I wish to thank Paula Amad, Andrew Peterson, Kyle Stine, and Larissa Werhnyak for their illuminating suggestions and ideas as I worked through earlier drafts of this essay.