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review by Hito Steyerl [08/2005] - home |
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Politics of Truth – Documentarism in Arts
[…]
A newer work, which dodges the widely spread representation of the aethetics of
poverty, is the video Forst (forest) by Ascan Breuer, Ursula Hansbauer, and Wolfgang
Konrad (A/D 2005). The black and white film primarily shows images of an impenetrable,
dark teutonic forest. Off screen we hear voices, which describe the experience of the
forest. The forest becomes an existential metaphor for exclusion, precariousness and
abandonment. Gradually the clues increases that the voices off screen come from refugees,
who live in the camp "Forst" in East Germany.
The feeling of Forst, a mixture of dark romanticism, existential exposure, and
freedom, remains in the balance, as a universial metaphor, which does not only
apply to particularisable groups such as refugees, but represents a new universal conditio
humana (human condition). In the second part of the film the atmosphere
changes. The forest is no
longer just a dark desert of solitude, but becomes a place where new
collectives and new collectives may emerge, just as much as new solidarities. In
a forceful shot, figures
in white t-shirts come slowly towards us, we cannot really make out their faces.
The forest is not only a cipher of atomisation, but also the place where opposition can form. The new
collectives recall memories of earlier forest inhabitants, Robin Hood as an
outlaw in Nottingham
Forest, the Tito partisans in the Bosnian mountains, or the partnership of the last
book-readers in Truffaut’s film Fahrenheit 451. It concerns universial
ciphersof oppositional solidarities. The
refugees are not written into ethnic or cultural traditional lines, they are not
social cases, rather they count in a tradition of freedom fighting, for which
the forest offered the necessary seclusion. To this extend, Forst refuses
radically dominant documentary truth politics, which control the public image of migration. The video does not
admit the
ambivalent reinterpretation of occupied metaphors, rather offers access to universal validity of
the experience of refugees. […]
text-clipping
taken from: “Politics
of Truth – Documentarism in Arts”
Hito Steyerl (PhD) is filmmaker and professor for Cultural and Post-colonial Studies at Goldsmiths
College, London |
