Human Rights Watch International Film Festival

Afterimage, Sept, 1994 by Laura U. Marks

The atrocities in the former Yugoslavia brought other responses, in addition to SA-Life, that ranged from verite to fiction. Oleg Novkorich's surreal Why Have You Left Me? (1993) is an amoral love story full of images that smirk at their own romanticism. It dramatizes the random violence of the adandoned in a way that the SAGA films must not if they are to reach a viewership willing to consider a prescribed action. Even more surreal is the chilling Serbian Epics (1992), a day in the life of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, made for BBC by Pawel Pawlikowski. Karadzic's determination to invent a traditional Serbian culture delimits his world to a few geographic landmarks that he lauds in poetry, a handful of historical events, and a group of singing dancing soldiers, like Brueghel figures with machine guns. Deadpan throughout, Palikowski limits his comments to bored pans away from the leader's heroic antics.

Chronicle of the Uprising, Imperial's Ism, and Serbian Epics suggest that political documentaries unavoidably contain a surreal element because the banal horror of the events they represent overwhelms narrative unity. Yet in general, the most popular documentaries at the Human Rights Watch festival were works like The Heart of the Matter (1993), Hollibaugh and Gini Reticker's appealing film on women with AIDS, or the peppy Cuba Va: The Challenge of the Next Generation by Gail Dolgin and Vincente Ranco: films that sewed up ambiguity into cathartic resolution, And at one level, it is hard to fault audiences who come for hard-to-take content but recoil from unconventional form on top of it. Yet the famous line from Handsworth Songs, "There are no stories in the riots, only ghosts of stories," reminds us that the tales it is most important to hear are those that fit least comfortably into a conventional documentary framework.(3)

NOTES

(1.) See Coco Fusco, Young, British, and Black: The Work of Sankofa and Black Audio Film Collective (Buffalo: Hallwalls, 1988), for the early history of the workshop. (2.) Contact Filmfree, Anne Marie de Brauw or Richard van der Brink, Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10, 1017 RR Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Phone 31-20-623-3673; fax 638-4489. (3.) For information about the annual Human Rights Watch International Film Festival write to Bruni Burres, 485 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6104.

LAURA U. MARKS is a writer and curator living in Rochester, NY. She is pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Rochester.