Orginally published by Cluster, written by Graeme Thomson

Crude Oil (2008)

Marseille. The 19th edition of the International Documentary Festival has hardly begun and we’re already being invited to put our feet up and take a (well deserved?) break along with the drilling crew of Wang Bing’s magnificent, sprawling 14 hour epic of Chinese venture capitalism, Crude Oil.
Despite its rather spartan furnishings, the workers’ rest cabin seems like a convivial hang-out. You can almost imagine an extension of the table where they sit or lie in various postures of fatigue, filmed for the most part in a single long-take, projecting out from the screen into the auditorium, beckoning us to join them sleeping, chatting, listening to music on a mobile phone’s tinny internal speakers, in this suspended moment of borrowed time, lost in the Gobi desert far from home, the dark rumble of the derrick outside briefly invading the sound field every time one of them enters or leaves according to his shift, a noise that in the end becomes almost comforting in its constancy though at the same time serves as a reminder that I too should be elsewhere, out there, watching other films, writing about them, adding more fuel to the furnaces of the culture industry. Crude Oil. A title which evokes the untreated, unrefined stuff of the real. Not exactly black, more a kind of off-black, desultory grey like the endless spools of mini DV tape that fuel the film itself, one of a number of works at this year’s festival that suggest the desire for a new accommodation between spectator and screen. Reposing the question of cinema in terms neither of movement nor time but of vigilance and repose, a symbiosis easier in the latter case than in the former (the uneasy feeling of watching others working). Not so much wondering what to do with, as how to inhabit, how to stay with, images.


Crude Oil – Crossing the oil fields

Restez avec nous, a refrain that echoes across the unspeakable gulf between before and after, viewer and screen, never fully declaring its sense or direction, one patiently building a space to dwell upon (or with) the other. Restes de vie. But on which side are the restes and on which the vie in the equation.
Through the austere framing of its subjects, each held and ‘interrogated’ in isolation, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s Khiam 2000-2007 reconstructs a collective historical trauma – the imprisonment without trial and torture of Lebanese political activists by Israeli occupation forces at the Khiam detention camp in Southern Lebanon – that has been subject to a double removal, first of all through the distorting transformation of the camp upon its liberation into a museum controlled by and dedicated to pro-Hezbollah militants (the ex-detainees Hadjithomas and Joreige interviewed were communists), and more recently, and definitively, with its destruction by the Israeli air force during the 2006 war. In the absence of images of the camp, Hadjithomas and Joreige set themselves the task of recomposing the space of collective memory through the testimony of six former detainees. The first part of Khiam shot in 2000 begins with each of them detailing the tortures, privations and humiliations to which they were daily submitted, but the film aims far beyond simply bearing witness to violence and injustice, becoming a complex meditation on the forms collective and individual resistance may assume under conditions of extreme duress, as the detainees explain how the need to reinvent the most basic practices of daily life, to forge out of nothing the tools (a pencil, a needle, a toothbrush) required to make confinement a little more tolerable, gave them a sense of intense focus, determination and lucidity powerful enough to defeat the enemy’s attempts to mentally and physically crush them, a matter not merely of survival but of eventual mastery, of reclothing la nuda vita, reimagining and immersing themselves in an “art of daily life” unthinkable for their captors, one which takes them on creative lines of flight as with time (and only time) on their hands they apply themselves to fashioning an exquisite array of handcrafted objects (lovingly photographed as a coda to part one) out of whatever scraps they can find. It is this struggle which the filmmakers evoke through their own precise and patient work of stitching together the testimonies, almost as though they were themselves participating in the process of passing materials, tools and techniques clandestinely from one cell to another.

Khiam 2000-2007

All of which makes the film’s second section, made seven years on after the destruction of the camp by aerial bombardment, all the more deflating to watch, as the carefully assembled collective enunciation of the group’s moral and psychic victory gives way to a shared yet equally fragmented sense of perplexity and loss, the loss of a place that for some had become a kind of home as well as a space of unimagined freedom. Paradoxically the will that years of detention failed to break is shattered by the erasure of the camp and of its history as a site of struggle. The last shot of the film, a shaky, hurried panorama of the debris is the only image of the camp we are offered, one which leaves the detainees own experiences floating uncertainly in a parallel, scattered history. Khiam 2000-2007 is a film whose lessons resonate far beyond its Middle Eastern context, a film that might strike a chord with any community formed by enforced ghettoization, then left to its own devices, and now caught up in the low-intensity war on poverty, poverty as a ‘poor art’ of building conditions for living outside the loop of unrelenting urban gentrification and upscaling (such as that currently reshaping the human geography of Marseille itself).
The expanded notion of documentary as the remapping or reconstitution of a territory of struggle is one shared by Olivier Derouseau’s Accoster though here it is affronted in more distant, abstract terms that leave us momentarily adrift, affectively unmoored, seeking our own dwelling or wandering space in its delicate assemblage of windows, gardens, canal-sides, each placed and surveyed in its specificity to the history of the working class communities around Lille, but equally reconvened in terms of an intensive ‘autistic’ itinerary (under the sign of Fernand Deligny) that acknowledges the difficulty of speaking ‘out’ about this history. The first phrase in the film, ‘There was so much to say that we began by being silent’, pronounced by a strange, atonal voice-off, translucently mirrored by a Feldmanesque score of resonating piano tones that disperse into clusters of chromatic granulations, only occurs after fifteen minutes, a montage of idyllic super 8 footage menacingly shadowed by the crosshairs of a telescopic sight. History is once again the target, the extimate, minor history of 20th century resistance on whose life the revisionist powers of the present have placed a contract. But the crosshairs also point to their opposite, the camera, cinema, the shot in its plenitude, its distillation of a profusion, the window as membrane between past and present, far and near, spoken and unspoken, inner and outer, film and video, the brain and the world, regathering the light of each realm to reproject it on the others.

Accoster (2008)

The problem of habitation is once again central. A Rancière text speaks about the working class idyll of a small house whose flower-patterned wallpaper recalls the graveyard, while Derouseau’s camera dwells obstinately on the margins, on windowsills, overgrown paths and riverbanks – there where the poetry is. And then his ‘handicapped’ actors lead us on a short train journey to a scene of Straubian lucidity in a park where, as in the background people can be seen take their leisure, the burning question arises, with the ‘night’ as their only space of liberty, why would the workers choose sleep?
Another kind of threshold dominates Pierre Creton’s L’heure du berger, that between the living and the recent dead, a border which the flattened sheen of digital video makes increasingly imperceptible and strange. Here the question is that of finding an accommodation between two states of the image, as document of what has passed and as invention of a present haunted by a past that continues to dwell there, just as La vie après la mort (2002) was by the imminent future disappearance of one of its actors, Creton’s friend Jean Lambert. Seven years on L’heure du berger finds Creton still living in Lambert’s house, following the repetitive rituals of the life of a paysan that give rise to strange splittings and redoublings. In Creton’s film the work of mourning, of memory and melancholia is also a work of at times joyous creation, of inventing the visual and auditory forms by which the vital signs of a vanished past (Lambert, the motionless hours of the paysan world) can take on new life and stir us to novel ways of thinking. We see Creton (or his avatar) listening to music, cutting hair, using a sewing machine to write a stitch through a photo of the house a gesture that at once separates and rejoining what has been sundered. Occasionally we are not quite sure if what we are seeing is reconvened archive footage from the earlier film or a Magritte-style procession of unidentifiable doubles with plaid workshirts in place of bowler hats.

L’heure du berger (2008)

A series of superimpositions summon a phantom, videographic body of distributed affective planes, such as a song evoking last moments that is given to a woman to sing in a feminized projection of grief while Creton can only stand behind or to one side, listening as he silently mouths the words. Elsewhere a spider cocoons a helpless fly in a swiftly woven tangle of invisible threads, honey is gathered from a swarming hive, radio voices discuss the complexities of mental weather. The sense of the composition is subtle, open, multiple in its resonances, at once sombre, tender and surreally comic.
If digital video, through its co-presencing and mixing of media, signals a certain erosion or partial effacement of the visual texture of memory, the membrane which assures the pastness of the past, it also opens the space for this cohabitation and coalescence of different temporal planes, its flatness is akin to a map that places all on a single surface of varying intensities, the movement it engenders a kind of molecular agitation. In Possible Lovers Raya Martin takes this notion to its extreme by juxtaposing a brief prelude of jumpy archive footage from 1919 of urban crowds in Manila with a single extenuating ninety-minute-long video shot showing a decidedly odd couple seated on a sofa in front of what we assume to be a computer screen, while a video camera squats in the left hand side of the frame. Who or what are these enigmatic figures: one dressed in top hat and tails like a transvestite Charlot, the other a burly modern couch potato in leisurewear, clearly pulsing to put the moves on his sleeping companion? What possible relation between the pair (and between them and us) does Martin’s film entertain?

Possible Lovers (2008)

As over and over again the man’s twitching hand and covetous gaze approach then withdraw from the decisive gesture of contact, a primal desire for cinema, for the saving illusion of the moving image, arises in the spectator but finds itself continually frustrated. We begin to think that what we are watching is in fact an endlessly stuttering loop, until an almost imperceptible change in the light announces the coming of day. Meanwhile the soundtrack, itself a subtly evolving sequence of loops, evokes clichéd images of motion and desire, a stampede of horses hooves, motorbikes, a hunter stalking his prey in long grass, sounds that trick and tease us with the promise that something more may develop out of the encounter. In this scenario hovering between webcam voyeurism and Warholian blankness the viewer has to find their own accommodation. Is there a place for us on the sofa? Martin’s Debordian coda, “We were two possible lovers, waiting for the film to end,” mirroring the spectator’s unrest, suggests it may be time get out of the house.