This machine kills fascists! Thanks for coming and good night!

The 2007 edition of the Isola Cinema festival has presented a number of films which offer unique views on a broad spectrum of contemporary social and political issues. Needless to say, each of these films tackles its own specific problem in its own specific way, but in my opinion a common normative framework for their interpretation exists nonetheless. The films I have in mind are Sissako's Bamako (2006), Wilkerson's Who Killed Cock Robin? (2005-7), Gerima's Harvest, 3000 years (1976) and de Seta’s Letters from the Sahara (2006). What follows bellow is not so much a text on the above mentioned films, but rather my personal account of what I find to be their conceptual cross section.

This cross section can be summarized in two words, which denote an axiomatic and dogmatically unquestionable concept of modernity: human rights. There has of course been a number of philosophical attempts to clarify it, but there are very few that cannot be dismissed as empty babble. These rare meaningful pursuits all point out that the concept of human rights is grossly problematic and far from obvious. All one needs to do to realize this is to ask the following question: who, today, is the subject of the rights of man? This subject is most certainly not a human being as such. There's no need to be specific, glaring examples of this fact can be found throughout the world. Closely connected to the ethical imperatives that pervade contemporary political newspeak is the misleading discourse of humanitarian organizations or – as Sissako likes to call them – “the Trojan horses of capitalism”. In the text I hope on one hand to use the films as illustrations of why these seemingly clear and harmless concepts are actually very questionable and on the other hand present my view of what socially aware film-making should consist of.

At the very core of the humanitarian discourse is an image of a human being as a helpless suffering victim that needs to be helped through western ‘ethical’ and 'humanitarian' interventions by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), G8, Unicef, etc. Enter Bamako. Abderrahmane Sissako has created a conceptual masterpiece. The film portrays an imaginary (what else!) judicial trial of the residents of a small African village Bamako against the IMF and the World Bank. In Bamako Sissako lends his voice to those perceived as victims, to those perceived as human animals, to those whose main goal in life is supposedly not to starve. Sissako brings a universe of meaning and understanding to our attention, an abundance of discourse which the humanitarian West never figured was there at all - and which is humiliating for this West precisely due to its disarming simplicity and clarity. Bamako sets the stage for a profoundly asymmetric dispute: street-smart villagers against hardcore corporate top-end lawyers. Through a series of arguments Sissako ponders the difference between legality and legitimacy and reveals we are currently dealing with an essentially illegitimate legality, with perverted law. If one takes a closer look at how the IMF lawyers are building their case, one cannot help noticing that most of their legal arguments are conveyed in the patronizing form of free-market ideology: you, a simple African villager, are not educated enough to understand why things need to be the way they are. Sissako’s answer is very concise: common sense is universal. You don’t need a PhD to formulate a substantiated critique of late capitalism – but you do need one to defend it! And by the way: the characters of all the villagers in Bamako were created by Sissako’s personal friends that wrote their own lines (sic!).
Bamako’s most valuable insight lies precisely in the rejection of hypocritical humanitarianism of IMF and World Bank and all its militaristic extensions, which in the name of ‘human rights’ block their very emerging.

Travis Wilkerson's Who Killed Cock Robin? functions as a complement to Bamako, maybe even its demonstration on a personal level. In Cock Robin, three men try to make their life in Butte, Montana bearable. After Butte’s copper mines have been closed down, Butte has turned into a depressing, uninteresting, passive and abandoned place. A ‘spiritual ghost town’, as the locals put it. Twenty-something year old Barrett works as a dishwasher so he can pay his bills and rent. His only property is his bike and his father’s guitar, decorated with a hand-written sign “This machine kills fascists!”. Apart from his best friend Dylan, his landlord Charlie is one of his closest acquaintances. Dylan, who works as a hospital clerk, is a Trotskyite. When he isn’t citing Aristotle, he is talking about permanent revolution, union struggles, imminent change etc. Charlie is an unemployed divorcee in his forties, and he lives off of Barrett’s monthly rent payments.

Who killed Cock Robin? is by all means a film that deserves a separate elaboration, but in relation to Bamako, I am tempted to ask: isn't the sign on Barrett's guitar, »this machine kills fascists!«, a perfect manifestation of the western humanitarian discourse? Isn't this what it is all about, namely that this machine doesn't kill fascists, but merely says it does? That what we are actually dealing with here is just empty, feel-good, western babble, neatly packed in the form of emancipated poetry? What could possibly be a clearer metaphor of what Band Aid truly stands for than a guitar with »this machine kills fascists!« written all over it? The year 1968 is over - and history is back with a vengence. Soothing proclamations on the declarative level go hand in hand with doing nothing to actively change status quo. Dylan, paradigmatic leftist intelectual, full of talk about high ideals, whose only function is to boost his self-admiration, falls into this picture perfectly. Barrett, on the other hand, is a perfect victim and he knows it – the moment he picks up his dad's guitar and starts to sing signifies the rock bottom, the climax of his self-pity. I don't mean to say, however, that Cock Robin is a gullible ideological film. It is not. It functions as a reflection of its time, our time, and though its characters appear in some ways propagandist, this cannot be extended to the film itself. Sissako and Wilkerson managed to create films that operate on a higher level and offer, each in its own style, a bird's eye view of society.

The same goes for Haile Gerima and his Harvest, 3000 years, which can also be viewed as an insightful social commentary. Like Bamako, Gerima's Harvest deals with the complex situation in contemporary Africa in almost binary oppositions: both films reveal the tensions between legitimacy and legality, caused by the remnants of colonial interventions, diverse as they are. The message of both films is to some extent similar and generated by the same constellation of global forces, but the segment which is perhaps more explicitly formulated in Harvest, is the link between the African colonialistic past and its modern social networks. And let us not forget that it was precisely the 19th and 20th century colonialism that paved the way for contemporary humanitarian missions, and which collateraly produced nouveau riche characters like Gerima's paranoid landowner that exploits his workers since he knows that working for him is their only chance of survival. This character is paradigmatic, although slightly less hypocritical (i.e. just outright violent) representative of the humanitarian discourse.

In this respect Bamako, Who killed Cock Robin? and Harvest, 3000 years are all pieces of a broad post-modern analysis of contemporary global politics, which is supposedly acting on behalf of the human rights. And although Bamako and Harvest function on a broader social level, while Cock Robin is more personal, they share one significant fact : they are all in one way or another films about new beginnings. The very semantic form of Bamako is an interruption of the given situation - at the risk of sounding pathetic, the manifestation of the trial brings us new hope, since this particular trial is something radically new, something yet unseen. In Harvest, the assassination of the rich landlord has the same role: it open up new possibilities of existence. The final shots in Cock Robin function in much the same way. Barret decides to set things straight, whatever that means to him. Furthermore, the reconciliation between Barrett and Dylan is ambiguous enough, true, but it does mark a new beginning.

The films leave it to us to ponder on how things might evolve in the future, but making this very pondering possible is what i think to be their main merit. This is, i believe, true humanism – without a shred of humanitarianism. As St. Augustine has put it in The City of God: »That a beginning be made man was created.« In this sense, all these films are optimistic in nature – they stage a new beginning. This, however, cannot be said for Vittorio de Seta's latest film Letters from the Sahara (2006), where Assane, a young Senegalese Muslim, interrupts his studies and emigrates to Italy after his father has passed away. After running a number of black market odd jobs, he gets involved in a platonic relationship with an italian social worker Catarina and things are starting to work out for him. One night he is attacked by a group of local racists and spends two weeks in bed with a broken rib. This is when he decides to go back to his country, loses his faith in God and he, well, gives up on life. De Seta's film is dissapointing in the sense that it is more or less a negative of all of the above. First, while none of the above mentioned three films is preachy, this one is. While Sissako's film is a tour de force in political discourse, de Seta's film is a celluloid embodiment of the Unicef spirit. And an implausible one, at best. Second, if the above films are films about new beginnings, this one is a fairy-tale structured film about the end: the all-powerful West has destroyed another soul, another victim. Assane has lost his faith. Letters from the Sahara is a desperate film in the sense that its plot wants to make us believe that all the options have been exhausted. Its structure is prophetic, it wants to make us believe that capitalism is here to stay, that it is our everlasting fate. The other three films end with a question, -what is to be done now?, while de Seta provides us with a fatalistic answer: nothing can be done. Furthermore, this answer comes from a narrative level, that implicates that de Seta is incapable of maintaining any distance between him and the story of the film. This is of course not problematic in itself, but it is unacceptable when it comes to stating a political truth. His previous films can be read as brilliant and lucid commentaries of the world that fascinates him; as positive statements that make words redundant. Letters from the Sahara functions as a confession of personal hopelesness with stereotypical political pretensions.

Humanitarian discourse is dangerous because by treating human beings as suffering victims, as human animals, it denies them their capability of spontaneity, of a new beginning. The significance of Wilkerson, Sissako and Gerima lies in the fact that they do treat their characters as autonomous beings, capable of acting – you may approve or condemn the things they have done, but it was them who did it. Director's attitude towards humanity is what makes a film political and emancipated – or not. This is where the line is drawn: are we capable of autonomous acts or not? If not, how are we different from any other animal? Sissako has created a superb demonstration of the essence of humanity. Vittorio de Seta seems to have forgotten that he had once believed in the very same ideal. Well, we will always have Bandits of Orgosolo.