On the border between India and Pakistan there is a place where the barriers are opened ceremonially once a day, then closed again shortly afterwards. During this procedure, soldiers from both countries stand face to face. They are dressed in magnificent uniforms and they move with a military comportment that seems strangely extravagant, as if this were the entrance to the Vatican or Buckingham Palace and the changing of guards an anachronistic occurrence kept up only for tourists. And, if fact, a lot of people do watch. They wear the floor-length robes that are traditional in this region. One day, the Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar was also among them. He made this scene the point of departure for his 1997 essay film »A Season Outside.«
In the concept of Documenta11, this work, which was shown in the Fridericianum, marked a point that can be described as a post-colonial subject pole. At the other end of the scale, and indeed literally at the other end of the exhibition, in the Binding Brewery, could be found the three-part video installation »Proof Range« by the American Michael Ashkin: footage of an unspecified proof range in New Jersey, filmed and edited with an objectifying gesture in which humans no longer appear and cultural landscapes are abandoned to the wind. In »A Season Outside,« Kanwar is present through his narrating voice. He describes the position of an intellectual in an atmosphere of violence: »How far can I withdraw?« At the same time he films an Indian military parade from a great distance, from an apartment where an old woman is looking out, rather dispassionately. Kanwar not only films the border as a spectacle, but also in a very interesting metonymic sequence in which, at first, only people's feet are to be seen that - shoeless or in worn-out sandals - move towards one another as if in a dance. However, they do not go beyond a particular line, but turn around again and move apart. The next shot solves this mystery. The feet belong to bearers who lift up sacks with various goods onto their shoulders at the border and carry them away. Kanwar shows trade on a border that is marked by hostility. In the second part of »A Season Outside,« Kanwar himself crosses a border and retires to Tibet, where he studies the culture of non-violence, while keeping his reading of Tolstoy's »War and Peace« in mind. From the various cultural motifs, he tries to find an »entirely different technique for intervention,« which nonetheless remains abstract. Accompanying his self-reflective observations, Kanwar shows everyday scenes from the regions he travels through. Because the commentary completely drowns out the original sound belonging to these pictures, »A Season Outside« resembles an early ethnological film about one's own culture onto which a second track has later been superimposed that provides an orientation where previously there had been an evidence of small differences. Viewers looking at the film with »Western eyes« do not immediately understand the most important facts shown visually in the film, since Kanwar tends to use a form of associative editing, allows himself to be swept away by the crowds while filming, and collects pictures rather than researching information. »A Season Outside« describes a geo-political conflict from the perspective of a (lonely) intellectual who stands on the other side of the pictures in as far as he talks about them, but also removes himself from them. This gesture is symptomatic for several works that, in the concept of Documenta11, go towards forming an imaginary map of the world. All regions are represented by at least one work, and these works, in their turn, contain all the common strategies of documentary filmmaking.
From Amar Kanwar's video, a line leads to »Out of the Blue,« a video by Zarina Bhimji, who was born in Uganda and lives in London. »Out of Blue« was produced by Documenta11, and thus has a central function in the explication of its concept of film - a view that aims at a »diasporic understanding of the modern age,« as Mark Nash, the curator in charge of film, writes in the catalogue. The video, which was projected in a small room of the Fridericianum, goes for around twenty minutes and provokes narrative interpretations without providing any concrete basis for them. There is no commentary and virtually no people. Uganda is deserted. Only on the soundtrack are women's lamenting voices to be heard. Bhimji creates a negative cultural history, starting with the fertile landscapes covered by morning mists. A steppe fire (or slash-and-burn?) changes the scenery. Buildings start to emerge in which traces can seen of people who are fleeing: mats lie on the floor, a large room serves as a dormitory. Bhimji moves through an empty, dilapidated »haunted house« with a ghostly, eerie gaze. She finds graves in the front gardens. »Out of the Blue« ends at Entebbe airport with an intimation of exile: the last shot is taken from a plane that is taking off. The film's political and historical references remain unspecific and are completely absorbed by the elegiac aspect. Zarina Bhimji presents a sort of transmigration of souls that, however, contains her own story: she, too, was a victim of the expulsion of the Indian minority from Uganda. The ghostly trail that Zarina Bhimji follows to a cultural non-location, without recourse to traditional western genres, remains a closed book if one does not know the biography of the artist. Nature becomes an allegory for tragedy.
The next video work, »Suspiria« by Stan Douglas, could have a corrective influence on any knee-jerk, sentimental interpretation of Bhimji's film. »Suspiria« is also about an empty historical space and the shadows that cross it. But in »Suspiria,« the culturally specific elements of the film are much more apparent than in »Out of the Blue,« in which the African landscape and the dilapidated colonial buildings are the only traces left of an otherwise invisible history of migration. The Documenta concept of a collection of »localities« unfolds along the global transport routes, but also along a time axis leading back to forgotten forms of political cinema. Here, Latin America becomes a past power, both in Mark Nash's theoretical explication, which refers to the concept of a »third cinema« (»tercer cine«) developed by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in 1969, and in the new version of this canon: »Memorias de Una Guerra Cotidiana« by Gaston A. Angelovici. This film, which was made in 1986 in association with the Gruppe Colectivo Cine Ojo, was presented in the Documenta hall on a video screen at the entrance, in the most casual way imaginable. For Nash, however, it expressly forms part of an avant-garde documentary tradition going back to Dziga Vertov. The »memories of an everyday war« contradict television pictures from the Chilean military dictatorship by showing privately filmed scenes of everyday life under a repressive regime. While Pinochet autocratically reinterprets the terms fascism and revolution in his speeches of legitimization, witnesses at the grass roots (often politically committed priests) tell of a »war« against the people. Songs and slogans make the film performative; it addresses the people involved in this social confrontation and encourages them. However, the abridged English version shown at Documenta is barely any different from any conventional television documentary about a situation of injustice.
Right next to »Memorias de Una Guerra Cotidiana« ran Johan van der Keuken's »Amsterdam Global Village,« in which the Documenta concept of a diasporic locality is reversed. The capital of the Netherlands becomes the point of convergence for a whole series of life stories in which the conditions of a post-colonial world are reflected. The way the film was presented, with a video screen and headphones in a location where a constant stream of people went past, reduced the film to functioning as its own trailer: »Amsterdam Global Village« refers to the fact of its existence, but also to a cinematic space beyond the Documenta exhibition. »Memorias de Una Guerra Cotidiana« is closer to the tradition of social reporting than to Soviet revolutionary cinema, but is only one example of how Documenta charges films with a demanding concept of the documentary to which they only partly do justice. Ulrike Ottinger's six-and-a-half-hour-long »Südostpassage« (»South-East Passage«), a journey from Berlin to the Black Sea through an eastern European landscape that will not even be included in the next EU expansion towards the east, is to be seen before an entire work that combines experimental (»Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia«) and orthodox (»Taiga«) ethnographic strategies. Ottinger has frequently explored the Far East. In »Südostpassage,« she takes a closer look at the Byzantine sphere of influence and a culture that is characterized by the interactions between Moslem and (eastern) Christian influences as well as those of the Jewish communities. Documenta helped in the production of this film, which was shown in the Binding Brewery in a screening room next to Louise Bourgeois. Ottinger crosses the national borders in the Balkans by restoring a cultural space that even the 20th-century regime was not able to destroy completely. The sonorous voice of an English-speaking narrator supplements the pictures, mostly street scenes from Wroc_aw or Odessa and various literary and philosophical material. The »Südostpassage« can be justifiably compared with an ethnographic expedition. By doing without original sound (which was essential in »Taiga,« in the sense of a natural force), a »third space« of objectivity is opened up from which the observed and the observer almost disappear.
Another film produced by Documenta is »Shoes for Europe« by Pavel Braila from Moldavia. The half-hour-long video was shown in a room at the Kulturbahnhof. It is about crossing a border in two senses: Braila documents the lengthy work needed to switch the trains from the north-eastern European gauge to the western gauge on the border between Moldavia and Rumania. An insert informs us that there is a difference of 85 millimetres between the gauges. Braila made the film on a cold, wet night. The goods wagons are lifted off their wheels like containers and lowered onto the other chassis on a siding. The travellers in the trains (once a man is shown tossing in his bed in a sleeping compartment) become ordinary freight. »Shoes for Europe« can be read as a metaphor for the borders that still cross Europe, dividing different systems from one another. However, in no shot does Braila hint at anything going beyond the mere documentation of the process (which he explains with title links). All the implications of this border traffic are omitted. At the end there is a moving shot that seems euphoric. The destination of the journey is unclear, but probably in the West.
The North American equivalent of the outer borders of the European states merged together under the Schengen agreement is the border between the USA and Mexico. Although the two countries are connected by the North American Free Trade Agreement, the USA rigidly protects its southern border against any attempt at immigration. Chantal Akerman devoted her Documenta installation »From the Other Side« to this (non-) region, taking off from her own film of the same name. The end of this film provided the first picture in the passage: on a video screen, one could see a moving shot on a highway, whose signs displayed the name Los Angeles, the centre for Hispanic migration to the USA. Accompanying the images, a woman, whose voice and accent identify her as the filmmaker herself, talks about a Mexican woman she lived with who one day disappeared again into illegality. In the second room, there were video screens showing pictures from the film that, above all, document the deterrent effect of the border: the barrier is protected by a number of security measures, and the US border police has many techniques for detecting people. The screens were arranged in such a way that they broke up the flow of the Documenta audience, which could only move slowly forwards, like at a passport control. At the exit of the installation there was a video wall showing a live picture of the border documented in »From the Other Side.« The reason this work is so significant is that Akerman alludes, even in the title, to her own freedom of choice: with her European passport she can travel almost as she likes, and, as an artist, she can choose her point of view. However, this fact, trivial in itself, is now declined in both directions: both the empathy of a personal encounter and the technocratic aspects of identification and selection play a role. The viewers could, in front of this final video wall, put themselves in the role of migrants, or they could in their turn search the picture for striking features. In Akerman's work, the exhibition itself becomes a »third space« of cinema that - after the editing room and the projection room - opens up new forms of montage in which experiences of the »other side« become visible.
Translated by Tim Jones