Human Rights Watch International Film Festival

Afterimage, Sept, 1994 by Laura U. Marks

Loews Village Theater, New York City April 29-May 12

Inevitably, following one of the screenings at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, an audience member will stand up, deeply moved, and say, "I think everybody everywhere should see this film." These responses reflect the belief, fostered by the hortatory address of conventional documentary, that the films represent universal values. Yet when it is possible for individuals to identify themselves as part of a "universal" audience, the sources of that solidarity are worth interrogating. This year's festival bears witness to the imperfect intersection of audiences for and addresses of political filmmaking.

The topic of human rights would seem to be well served by the discourse of sobriety (to use Bill Nichols's term) that characterizes conventional documentary film: claiming a direct relation to the real and the ability to prescribe action. But festival programmer Bruni Burres diverts this agenda by including works that question their own relation to the real and works that encourage reflection, pleasurable or not, as well as action.

The reception of two films about female genital mutilation, less well-known than Pratibha Parmar's Warrior Marks (1993) illustrates the sobriety debate: Messin' Up God's Glory (1993) by Avril Johnson and Afua Namiley-Vlana for Black Audio Film Collective, and Fire Eyes (1993) by Soraya Mire. The two screen together well: both are sensitive to issues such as the supposed betrayal of Afrocentric politics by African women's-rights activists. Both insist upon distinguishing cruel, patriarchal custom from culture. But where Fire Eyes is expository, the briefer Messin' Up God's Glory is poetic and indirect. For this reason one audience member (in an otherwise receptive audience) castigated filmmaker Johnson and producer Lina Gopaul for using poetry to represent an abomination; he preferred the sober discourse of a film like Fire Eyes that prompts a cathartic and outraged response.

The three advertised highlights of the festival were Sa-Life, a series of films shot in Sarajevo by Sarajevo Group of Authors (SAGA); a retrospective of the work of Margarethe von Trotta; and a profile of London's Black Audio Film Collective. Each program brought a different agenda to the theme of human rights. The SAGA films testify to atrocities, in a way perhaps most expected of a festival like this, but using the rawest of verite styles. The von Trotta retrospective pays homage to the German director's feminist understanding of they workings of power and injustice, expressed in fiction narrative. Black Audio uses a "difficult" form of self-reflexive documentary to give shape to the rights issues of the African diaspora.

Attendance at the programs varied. The von Trotta screenings were sold out and packed with adoring crowds, mostly women. SAGA films were attended less well, but with earnest attention. The Black Audio screenings were generally sparsely attended and their audiences were at least half African Americans. Numbers at other screenings were also weighted in terms of cultural group: a large audience including many Irish Americans at The Fourth Green Field (1993) by Margaret Bruen, a smallish group, predominantly Chinese Americans, at Discussions Caused by a Film's Filming Being Stopped (1994) by Ning Dai.

Why the difference in numbers among these rather segregated audiences? I trace it to the historical constituency of human rights activism in North America. Activists for organizations like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty international still tend to be drawn from the traditional Left. They are white, middle-class, and in a position to take a slightly abstract stance toward the issue of human rights; to see human rights more in the general terms of the United Nations Charter than in terms of particular sites of violence. They are also a bastion of traditional documentary viewership. Now the festival's constituency is in flux, as the organizers seek to reach more publics for these films. As filmmaker Amber Hollibaugh noted ironically during the festival symposium on political filmmaking, "The audiences we want to reach are the kind who don't come to theaters where documentaries show." In gestures that offset its academic and art-house aura, the festival is hosted by the Loews Theater in New York's East Village and, this year, co-sponsored by MTV. High school groups attend daytime screenings.

Black Audio's Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993), a United States premiere, responds to interests piqued by Spike Lee's X-pic last year. Seven Songs had a rocky start reaching its audience, but the film's final screening sold out after the festival was reviewed in the Village Voice. This late triumph reflects the coalition of the traditional human-rights audience with African American viewers and the art-film audience.

Black Audio's simultaneously deconstructive and re-sacralizing approach to the historical record is especially apt for the figure of Malcolm X. In contrast to the static and triumphant hero of Spike Lee's X, Seven Songs begins with Malcolm already dead, and the living beginning to construct stories from their memories of him. Seven Songs was made in collaboration with a number of black (including South Asian) filmmakers, writers, and activists, such as Arthur Jafa, Coco Fusco, and Toni Cade Bambara. To involve all these members of a diasporic intellectual community in such an act of reconstruction is a way of affirming that the history exists in potential form, even if there are no records to corroborate it. Yet this reconstruction is a difficult and dangerous process. While it honors the strategy of oral history by using it in this and other films, Black Audio is not sanguine about its recuperative character. The memory they choose to evoke is dysfunctional, acknowledging fictions and silences.