Ten mangled neon strip lights hang from the ceiling, framing two fans, stilled and blackened by years of cigarette smoke. At the front of the room, behind the judges’ bench, a triumvirate of tattered, empty leather armchairs. Six overweight policemen sit behind me. To my right, the length of the room is taken up with a cage; a cage that has been filling up with men in blue jumpsuits since I arrived an hour ago. We are at an appeal hearing for my cousin, Alaa Abd El Fattah, court-martialed and imprisoned by Egypt's new military rulers for refusing to accept their legitimacy. He has been in jail for thirty six days now.
Last week I was choking, suffocating in endless tear gas as we battled the Egyptian police. I was carrying bleeding bodies to field hospitals. I was running between filming burning buildings, uploading videos to YouTube and constant interviews with foreign news agencies.
Ten days ago I was trapped in a doorway in Bab el Louk; soldiers had taken control of the embattled streets. With their shotguns, they slowly approached the doorway where we were hiding, metre by metre. I didn’t know how many; I could only hear the clicks of the reload as they got closer. And closer. We waited for them to turn the corner, to fire.
I was convinced I was filming my final moments of life.
Three guns came round the corner and the girl I was with took a decision - she raised her head and voice from behind my body, loudly, clearly - there's a girl here, there's a girl here, there's a girl here, let us out, please, let us out, let us out. Her quick thinking kept us alive.
How could I go home to a production budget? To casting?
I am constantly on the verge of tears.
How can film-makers, whose craft is so slow, so expensive, so made with its eye on the future, operate through these revolutionary nights?
How, when the days used to be stretched long by defeat, did anyone ever begin such labours before them?
Where once we had time now we have energy.
Where once we were few now we are many.
Everyone now is a film-maker. Our revolutions must be among the most recorded events of all time. The gap between the classical, expensive production process and the disposability of daily life is being ever more tightly bridged. Every mobile phone now has the power to challenge, to become the narrative. This disruptive decentralisation of the news, the occasional eruption of civilian participation, has happened many times before. The most famous is the Zapruder film, without which there would be very little fuel for debate about the manner of JFK's death. But now it is not the occasional blip, it is civilians and civil institutions that, time and again, are capturing the moments that are shaping the narrative. They are there for that fleeting moment of sadism that lays bare the ungraspable violence of years of state systems in an instant.
The tortured, lifeless bodies of Khalid Said and Hamza al Khatib; the young Cairene who stood up and stopped a water cannon; the Alexandrian killed as he opened his jacket to reveal his weaponless body; Neda Agha Soltan's dying moments; Gaddafi's capture. The news crews are not there. The people making the news are.
Jean Charles De Menezes. Sean Bell. Marc Duggan. The unrecorded. How the change in the world could burn brighter.
*********
December 6th
I am home from the hospital where Manal, Alaa's wife, has given birth to the newest member of our family. His father, five miles away, in the same jail that houses the Mubarak sons, has not yet seen him.
I film a little then start to cut a youtube video. Footage from yesterday at the court, Alaa handcuffed to a policeman, standing with us for five minutes before being taken back to the police truck. Cuts to today at the hospital, the new baby being stroked and adored by his aunts, his mother. I doubt it will get to 5,000 views but it feels important, necessary.
We talk about whether there's any building outside the prison that Alaa can see, whether we can project a home movie onto it.
The question of how traditional film-makers fit into this new video landscape will be what defines the future of Arab cinema and beyond. How can the new mobile-phone pixel rate of reality be worked into the 'cinematic'? Can cinema shift from formulaic narrative and its fetish for fantasy towards something that actually represents life, does justice to life?
I am privileged to be working with a new collective of young film-makers in Cairo. Each dedicated to making their camera count. We call ourselves Mosireen, or We Are Determined. We work fluidly and interchangeably and with increasing efficiency and remarkably little ego.
Four days ago we finished a film on the martyrs of the Egyptian revolution. The film ends with a scrolling list of all the names of the dead. It is the first time they have been gathered and listed together. Three columns of names run across the screen for over two minutes. It is heartbreaking. We screened it on a makeshift cinema that we erect in Tahrir whenever we can.
And when the moment comes that gives us both energy and time, we can begin to think again about longer, more detailed films. Films that would traditionally be classed as cinema.
But since our reality is so changed, so must our films be. Cinema is more tied to reality than any other art form. Even Avatar needed a basis of reality to record. And yet the push from the mainstream has always been towards the unreal. Hollywood produces nothing except franchise and fantasy, growing more craven and repetitive each year. In the Arab world, industrial cinema has consisted of romantic comedies and schlocky thrillers for thirty years, each more removed from the urgencies of reality than the last. People, for now, are still paying for tickets, but we have to believe they are growing tired. Tired of being told that their reality is unimportant, that their partners are ugly, that their lives are uninteresting and their emotions pedestrian. Most of the world's population have never seen anything close to their reality represented on screen.
In America et al people are shifting to television. In the Arab world we have nowhere to go. The horrors of television production make a trip to the cinema feel like a night at the opera.
So we must take it as an opportunity. There is a moment now, a possibility, not just to reinvigorate our wretched film industries, but to revolutionise the way we construct moving-image narratives. And maybe to lead the world into the new.
The traditional division between cinema and documentary shows very clearly that cinema is built upon the re-creation of reality, rather than the capturing of it. It must then be true that the more reality you have to deal with, the harder it is to recreate it cinematically. The more crowd scenes and gunfights there are in your reality, the more time and resources you then need to "make the movie".
And the inverse, Americans and American society are probably the most divorced from reality, the most existent in a media-fed self-consciousness. Hollywood has harmonised the ideologies of romanticised militarisation, of the pointlessness of civic or personal engagement and the primacy of the individual's sensitivities and narratives into an endless stream of summer blockbusters and grosses equivalent to national debts. And in the constant framing of the boy-done-good, the worker-turned-hero, the wife-turned-renewed-object-of-sexual-desire an unattainable and basically undesirable society is constantly being re-packaged and sold back to an increasingly disenfranchised audience as being about them.
We are lucky then, that the media manipulation we’re fighting in Egypt is so heavy-handed, so divorced from reality, that the battle is over the sheer volume of the media message, rather than decades of emotional manipulation of a national idea of identity.
Our governments in the Arab world still rely heavily on the police, on physical violence as their primary method of population control. And in the violent cycle of these days, each beaten body, each blinded eye is a spark that might just pull a million people on to the streets. Every camera, every phone, every civilian now has the power to change the future.
Which means, of course, that those of us working in the movies have an opportunity. There is so much room for improvement, so little competition, so few institutional frameworks to dismantle, that we have everything to play for. As we are imagining a new, fairer, world, so we must imagine a new, fairer cinema; not one that would come at the expense of story or entertainment, but one that shuns the primacy of the individual. One that moves away from the shot-reverse-shot formulae that soak the imagination out of the frame. One that isn't afraid to try and capture reality rather than permanently worrying about financing the recreating of it.
I have changed my mind and decided to vote. I'm not happy about it, I think the elections are a sham, but since I stated publicly on Al Jazeera that I wasn't going to vote, I feel I have to put my thoughts down for the record.
There are three main reasons:
1. The elections have been designed as a weapon against us.
They have been designed to give SCAF supporters and the MB as big a slice of parliament as possible. For a long time I wasn't convinced that the MB and SCAF were co-ordinating. But having seen them build the wall to contain the revolution last Thursday I finally accepted it.
The hierarchical, patriarchal, nationalist-but-self-interested nature of the two organisations makes them perfect partners. It was the Military's dependence on American aid and America's supposed trepidation about Islamist parties that gave cause for doubt. Friends of SCAF Generals would anecdotally report that they had received direct instructions from Washington not to allow the MB to take more than 30% of parliament.
We'll see how things turn out, but it certainly seems now that the power triangle of the Military, the MB and SCAF may have found a balance that satisfies all of them.
And so, if by voting, I have a 0.0001% chance of disrupting their goals for parliament, and by not voting I clearly have a 0% chance, then I will take the 0.0001% and vote.
2. Voting is not a vote on SCAF's legitimacy
I think that what we saw on Tuesday and Friday, on those two millioneyas, was a public declaration of SCAF's illegitimacy. There was no hesitation about the chants - everyone was unified in calling for an end to military rule and for the removal of the Field Marshall. Now that same declaration is being made through voting, that same resistance to the designs of those who have been preparing for these days is being shown.
3. Voting and Tahrir are not mutually exclusive
This is the most important point of the three, and I think those of us in Tahrir need to make sure that people who aren't in the Square every day do not feel alienated from Tahrir, or less revolutionary for having voted.
No one is expecting voting to achieve the aims of the revolution. I don't think anyone even wants to vote. The elections are a sham. But they are one of the battles that are being forced on us so I think we should engage.
The revolution will rise or fall on how widespread it is. Tahrir was most effective when it was the physical representation of a national will; when the country was shut down because of it and the wave of union actions behind it. It can be that again, but we have to make sure it keeps feeling like everyone's home.
Yesterday, at 7.30am, seven Central Security Forces trucks pulled up at the entrance to Parliament St. The latest part of the administrative centre of Cairo to be occupied by revolutionaries.
As they arrived everyone quickly sprung from under their blankets and ran to stand in the road in front of them, chanting at them, waving them away.
After a few minutes of uncertainty, the trucks began to turn, slowly, to head away.
The seven trucks chaotically U-Turned, gently bumping into each other as they went.
They turned the corner and drove away. We had won, they had been driven away. Then, one minute later, a group of men are running towards us carrying a body on their shoulders. The 19 year old body of Ahmed al Sayed Sorour.
When I saw him his lower half was covered in blood and he was unconscious. Later, we would re-trace the little puddles to find the spot he was injured in.
He was raced to an ambulance in Tahrir and taken to hospital. Two hours later it was confirmed that he had died.
Vlogger and activist @sarrahsworld was with his family at the hospital and then the morgue. She reported that the coroner announced he had died of a 'shattered pelvis.'
State TV / SCAF began broadcasting their version of events from around 9am, stating that the trucks had taken a wrong turn and, in their panicked retread, had run Surour over, and he had died of a shattered pelvis.
This is being pushed as the narrative, but based on what I saw on the day and research done since, I believe it is a lie.
There are two main component to the State narrative:
1. The trucks had taken a wrong turn.
Apart from the clear absurdity of this statement, which implies that several units of the police were unaware that there was a revolution going on in the centre of Cairo, we can see from the video below that seven trucks arrived and parked simultaneously. And they arrived in rows of two which, for trucks in transit, is irregular.
2. Ahmed Surour was killed by being run over
There are several reasons to believe this is untrue:
- The trucks are not moving very quickly at all. Though it was chaotic it hardly seems chaotic enough for an able-bodied young man to be run over.
- The nature of the wound does not look like it resulted from impact with a vehicle. Look at this still image from the video. It clearly looks like a single bullet hole to his lower back.
- The cause of death at the morgue was stated to be a "shattered pelvis," which made room for SCAF to declare he was run over. But, according to the actor, Khalid Abdalla, a bullet to the pelvis can cause massive shattering of the bone, leading to a fatal internal haemorrhage. He knows this through conversations with an American sniper, who was working as a technical advisor on his last film Green Zone. The sniper told him that they are, in fact, trained to aim for the pelvis with their first shot because it is lethal shot, though it doesn't appear so at first. Then, when people gather around the victim to find out what has happened, they are picked off one by one with head shots.
I am not implying that he was killed by a sniper, but this piece of information tells us that it is possible to die from one bullet wound to the lower back. Which leads me to believe that SCAF are lying about Sorour's cause of death and that he was shot by a policeman.
This comment piece first appeared in the Guardian on Friday November 25th.
For five days a battle has raged across downtown Cairo between the Central Security Forces (CSF) and unarmed protestors. At least forty people are dead. Thousands are injured. There are seven field hospitals and hundreds of doctors at work in Tahrir Square.
It has centred on Mohamed Mahmoud St., the road leading from Tahrir Square in the direction of the hated Ministry of the Interior, whose jurisdiction the police forces fall under. For 110 hours revolutionaries and the CSF have fought for its control. The revolutionaries aiming for the Ministry. The CSF aiming for Tahrir. The revolutionaries armed with rocks ripped up from the pavements. The CSF armed with shotguns, rifles and CS gas acquired from around the world. I have seen shotgun shells and bullet casings from Italy, China, USA, Libya and the Czech Republic; tear gas canisters from CTS in Pennsylvania and Chemring in Hampshire. And their supply is seemingly unlimited. Egypt bought 32,000 units of tear gas from the US in 2009 alone.
At least three people have died from asphyxia.
This violence has sparked part two of our revolution, and the pressure on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to step aside to democracy is intense. For every body carried away from the front line to the field hospital, another twenty arrive the next day. Monday's proposed elections have lost any glimmer of legitimacy they had. While Tahrir is in action, Tahrir is democracy.
But there are key parties with a deep investment in these elections: SCAF and the Muslim Brotherhood. And yesterday they set about working to strangle our renewed revolutionary vigour.
Though the Brotherhood have repeatedly declared themselves to be part of the Revolutionary forces, they explicitly refused to join this renewed wave of protest when the call went out for a millioneyya (million-person protest) on Tuesday. And when the Square pulsed with Mubarak-level numbers they were left looking irrelevant, self-interested and disconnected from the will of the people.
So yesterday the Army and the Brotherhood joined forces to build a wall across the battle lines. The Army enforced a ceasefire, moved in with a bulldozer, a crane and cement blocks. The Brotherhood dispatched dozens of mid-level members and sheikhs from al-Azhar to cheer them on and push people - against their will - away and into the square. When it became clear that violence wasn't scaring people away, that it was only emboldening them, they decided it had to end.
The elections must go on.
So now there is a Wall. For the second time since taking charge, SCAF have taken their cue from our neighbour to the East. This is how they end violence. Not by controlling the police. Not by listening to people's demands. Not by stepping aside to democracy. But by trying to strangle their will. For as much as this Revolution believes in peace, it hates the police. The police who beat people to death on the streets, the police who fire shotguns into crowds of civilians, the police who torture people before asking them a single question.
But this fake peace will not be enough. The Army and the Brotherhood continue to think simplistically. When they find violence wont keep people away, they try peace instead. They think that if we stop seeing people's bloodied bodies on television people will go back to being herded towards these elections.
But, as usual, they are wrong. Today is going to be huge. There will be tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people out across the country unified, once again, in their demands. For the SCAF to step down, for a civilian transitional council to take full legislative power to take us to real elections and for us to begin to live in the freedom that over 1,000 people have died fighting for.
My cousin, Alaa Abd El Fattah was sent to jail by a military court today. This is a statement we released.
We, the Campaign to End Military Trials of Civilians, condemn in the strongest possible terms the imprisonment of prominent Egyptian activist and blogger, Alaa Abd el Fattah and the unjust and illegal system of military tribunals implemented by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) since becoming rulers of Egypt on January the 28th, 2011.
Today Alaa Abd El Fattah was summoned to the Military Prosecutor's office, accused of assaulting military personnel, stealing military weaponry and inciting violence against the military. On questioning, Abd El Fattah declined to answer the prosecutor’s questions, stating that it is illegal and a clear conflict of interest for the military, as a party accused of a crime, to hold proceedings or adjudicate fairly. He was sent to detention pending further military investigation.
As of today we refuse to co-operate with the military prosecution of civilians and we call on all Egyptian citizens to stand with us.
At least 12,000 Egyptian civilians have been subjected to summary, covert military trials. The accused are often denied counsel, the opportunity to review evidence or examine witnesses; there are limited avenues of appeal. Eighteen death sentences have been handed down so far.
Abd El Fattah's targeting is only the latest example of the systematic targeting of journalists, media figures, bloggers and activists by SCAF.
Abd El Fattah is being held responsible for violence on October 9th, the night when the Army killed at least 28 peaceful protesters and injured several hundred more. Several respected human rights organisation have attested to this.
Furthermore, it is perverse that Mina Daniel is listed as the first name on the Military Prosecutor's list of the accused. Mina Daniel was killed by military gunfire on October 9th.
Abd El Fattah is now being held for fifteen days in prison - which can be renewed indefinitely - by a body which has no legal authority to do so. Twenty eight more are in jail. Mina Daniel paid with his life.
We demand that Alaa Abd El Fattah be freed immediately, that military trials of civilians be stopped and all those sentenced thus far be released or at least retried before civilian courts. We support all of those who similarly refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the military prosecution.
This is not the new Egypt we have fought and died for.
Mosireen, the new independent media collective I'm working with in Cairo, has started regular Tuesday night screenings. Each week we'll show a contemporary short film followed by a feature. The features will be fiction/documentary, old/new, art-house/trashy - we'll see how it goes. We're living in lawless times so we don't have the rights to screen them, but hope the directors and distributors will forgive us. We're not charging anything, just hoping people drop some change in our donations box.
We started last Tuesday with the pirate premiere of Mostafa Youssef's Blue Dive and then showed Costa-Gavras' Z.
Next Tuesday we're showing Ahmed el Lozy's Night Shift followed by Steve McQueen's Hunger.
Maikel Nabil's ongoing hungerstike is, of course, the reason we want to show this film. But it's not a straightforward decision. Is showing a film that delves deep into the physical pain of hunger striking an action? Can you consider it motivating, mobilising? Or is it cruel and inappropriate? Should we, instead, be outside the psychiatric hospital he's been transferred to? Should we be doing something with our own bodies as well?
We couldn't come to an answer at first, but as Maikel is now being joined by another 83 prisoners going on hunger strike we decided that making McQueen's film available for the public to see was important. Not only for an emotional understanding of what someone on hunger strike is going through, but also for a politico-historical understanding of how it has been used before, what worked and what didn't. One of the key lessons Bobby Sands and his comrades learned was not to strike together. Once the first person grows seriously weak then his life is in your hands. So they strike one by one, with a week between them. Maikel Nabil has been alone throughout his 68 days - how much longer can he last? A hunger strike is traditionally the recourse of the weaker party in a struggle. Have we accepted that the revolutionaries are now the weaker party in Egypt?
So we'll screen it and discuss all this on Tuesday, 9pm at Mosireen.
This is an essay I wrote for my univeristy dissertation. I got a tremendously low score on it because it turns out that Oxford examiners don't like to consider films as text. But I thought there was some good stuff in there, and re-reading it helped to remind me why I didn't likeThe Tree of Life.
Mechanization and the Death of the Wild West
Key Themes in Three Films by Sam Peckinpah and Terrence Malick.
The Western is one of the oldest and most popular genres of American cinema. But while film began to grow as a popular medium in the early 20th century the days of the Wild West were very quickly ending. Hollywood's West was past from its beginning; and so had to be invented.
The arrival of Civilization is what most commonly marks the end of the Wild West, and one of the clearest markers of the arrival of this civilization is the advent of machinery. We can identify mechanization as being both the replacement of human or animal labour with machines, and the use of machines to assist human operators, and the Western uses these machines in a variety of ways in the telling of its own death.
In Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) we are presented with three key machines: the handgun, the train and the machine gun. Before considering their roles in the cinematic Wild West we should consider briefly their historical development.
The history of mechanization in America begins at the turn of the 19th century and although the industrial revolution took place entirely in the East, the effects of mechanization were inseparable from the development of the West. Specifically, Captain John H. Hall’s pioneering of the use of interchangeable parts in firearms between 1820 and 1840 and his development of this new system of manufacturing provided the affordable weaponry needed for the masses of self-reliant pioneers. Secondly, the railroads, “the industrial revolution incarnate,” which started passenger service in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1831 and eventually linked America’s coasts at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869 provided the contact the West needed with the East for increased migration and economic growth. By the time the machine gun is invented the Westward expansion of America has already been completed.
The Bureau of the Census announced the Frontier in 1890. The period most visited by the Wild West of Hollywood is the 1880s. The Western obsesses over this moment of transition from ‘wild’ to ‘civilized,’ this moment of dying and of reifying. And central to this moment are its machines. It is impossible to imagine a Western without guns; while the train, though not essential, is a powerful, versatile symbol. In 1831, John Stuart Mill wrote that “the locomotive is a perfect symbol because its meaning need not be attached to it by a poet; it is inherent in its physical attributes. To see a powerful, efficient machine in the landscape is to know the superiority of the present to the past.”In the Western the train is put to use representing the unity of the nation (The Iron Horse (1924)), science and progress (Duel in the Sun (1946), Carson City (1952), Johnny Guitar (1954)), employment and economic opportunity (Union Pacific (1939), Red River (1948)), politics and democracy (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)) or an unknown future (Back to the Future III (1990)). It is a powerful American symbol that, since Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), has dominated the iconography of the frontier. Trains are progress, just as America is the future. You want it, you need it, though you know that with it comes your end. The only certainty the future holds is death.
How, then, are Peckinpah and Malick - two wholly distinct film-makers - drawn together at this cross-section of cinema and history?
For Peckinpah, the West was both professional and personal. He often talked in interviews about his childhood in California, and how he felt uneasy in the latter half of the 20th century: “I grew up on a ranch, but that world is gone. I feel rootless.” He was an ardent activist against the Vietnam War and was vocal in his disdain for machinery, telling a BBC interviewer in 1982 that “technology ran over [Cable] Hogue, technology ran over England in the Industrial Revolution, and technology is running over the world today.” Peckinpah produced a handful of films that left an important mark on the Western and on American culture and Buscombe writes that “of all the great directors of the Western, Peckinpah is the most self-conscious, the most aware of working in a tradition,” and we can clearly see many generic tropes invoked and manipulated in his films. He also pushed the genre forward and his skilful montage and stylized violence helped reinvigorate the struggling form in the late 1960s.
Terrence Malick is a very different character. He grew up in Texas before studying philosophy at Harvard and Oxford. After spending a year at the AFI Conservatory he started on his film career, making Badlands and Days of Heaven, after which he moved to France and disappeared from public view. He reappeared twenty years later to make The Thin Red Line (1998) but still refuses to give interviews. While Malick is not as closely associated with the Western as Peckinpah, we find many of the standard themes of the genre explored in his first two films: violence, wilderness, manliness and myth in Badlands; exploration westward, farming and property rights in Days of Heaven. These themes, though, are taken in a different direction to the point where we may no longer be able to call the films Westerns. However, it is through reference to the codes and ideological underpinnings of the form, as well as to the status of the Western in American culture, that we can better understand the films, and the importance of his revisionist's take on the genre.
To Peckinpah first, then, and The Wild Bunch. The film is set in 1913 and tells the story of a group of ageing outlaws looking for “one good score” before quitting. They are being hunted by Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), an old partner who got caught and now has to lead a posse of comical but vicious mercenaries bankrolled by Harrigan (Albert Dekker), a railroad boss. The Bunch are hired by Mexican despot, General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) to rob American munitions from a train, which they do. Angel (Jaime Sanchez), one of the Bunch, convinces his partners to give one crate of weapons to his village to defend themselves against Mapache. Angel is discovered and tortured and when the Bunch try to save him they are killed in a massacre that wipes out a whole town. The 1913 setting gives the film a timeframe that immediately positions it outside of the classic period of the genre, a move emphasized by the cutting of the opening credits between colour images and black and white stills, cutting between old and new, myth and history, old frontier photography and modern moving image.
The year before The Wild Bunch was released, audiences were invited to read Gabriele Ferzeti’s crippled railroad tycoon as an embodiment of the corrupting, exploitative power of capitalism in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Now, in 1969, Peckinpah presents Harrigan, a merciless railroad baron who wants the train-robbing Bunch dead. The opening scene, in which the Bunch are ambushed while robbing a bank, ends in a bloody shootout in the Texan town of San Rafael. Several citizens are killed but Harrigan, who lured the Bunch into the town, is unrepentant, and dismisses the townspeople, shouting “we represent the law!” The coldhearted Harrigan is thus quickly established as the dominant power in the region who, worryingly, does not have to answer to anyone. Here, control of technology leads to control of the law, and Harrigan entangles the locomotive, the great American symbol, in the web of a formidable and corrupt power system.
This association of the railroads with power and corruption has clear sources in American history. Entrepreneurs and businessmen like Cornelius Vanderbilt, James Fisk and Jay Gould were the public faces of the railroadbut were seen to be “attracted to railroads not by the prospect of profits from running a passenger and freight service, but by the riches promised by the exploitation of the land grantand by manipulating the company stock.” The Credit Mobilier scandal of 1872 exposed corruption as high up as Congress. But, alongside public anti-railroad sentiment there nearly always existed a distinct perception of the machine itself, of the machine as symbol, as “testament to the will of man rising over natural obstacles.”
Lethbridge, Alberta, circa 1908. Erecting Lethbridge Viaduct over the Oldman River
Source: Shorpy
Having established Harrigan as a villain, when we are presented with the locomotive itself it is through a fade in to a long shot of a rugged, mountainous landscape where the machine gracefully moves in from the distance, cutting through a mise-en-scène reminiscent of the photographs of Andrew J. Russell. The Bunch set about stealing the munitions on board and do so with a precise, practiced method. They execute the robbery with ease because it is a standard part of their generic terrain and robbing it is a coded assertion of their potency within that genre, of their link to legendary train-robbing gangs like the Jameses and to the cinematic legacy they share in from The Great Train Robbery onwards. But while Bishop’s (William Holden) heartbeat set the rhythm of the opening scene in San Rafael, and was the referent for the audience’s sense of tension, now it is the train’s ‘heartbeat’ that dominates the soundtrack, its rhythmic breathing that builds the pressure. It dictates the speed of the action as machines now dictate the speed and rhythm of the world: from the everyday organization of life according to strictly compartmentalized timeto the historical march of science and progress, the railroad now represents a new, mechanical rhythm of both personal and nationalized existence. As this is a development which, by 1913, is impossible to counter, when the Bunch send the train screaming back down the tracks we know their symbolic rejection of the machine to be futile. The Wild West is being overtaken by machines and the power systems that arrive with them. On its way back down the tracks we are given a point-of-view shot from the point of view of the train itself, granting the machine a subjectivity, a cinematic consciousness even.
One of the defining stylistic points of The Wild Bunch comes with the skill of Lou Lombardo’s editing. At 3,342 edits, ithad by far the highest number of cuts in a colour film to date (around 600 was the average) Lombardo’s cuts offer us constantly shifting viewpoints on the action. From the Bunch to children to civilians passing by, there is a consistent variety of subjective perspectives being offered. This fragmented style, in its rejection of the tracking shot, of a camera that moves and links things together, can also be read as a rejection of the train’s linking of America. Railroads brought with them a level of connection between people and towns previously unthinkable, they forced a national consciousness, they united the States of America and it is in this process that Peckinpah locates the death of the Wild West. The freedom of the frontier, of the cowboy, is crushed under the weight of the railways that brings the West fully and inextricably into the matrix of Union, into "the most effective system of national control devised in modern times" (Howard Zinn).
And then we have the machine gun. The blood that it sheds on screen was unparalleled in cinema in 1969 and, once unleashed, it leaves no one in Agua Verde alive; it achieves a level of violence impossible with a handgun. But what truly defines the machine gun from the handgun is that it strips its bullets of conscience. With a handgun a cowboy chooses whom or what he shoots and his aim is as clear as his conscience (we hope). The machine gun frees its user from that responsibility. It is not designed to uphold the law or right a wrong, but to kill as efficiently as possible. This opposition is reflected in the contrasted styles of the opening shootout and the closing massacre. The opening shootout is highly confusing to the characters, but through careful editing and the use of multiple perspectives we are able to see quite clearly who is shooting whom – that there is a human choice behind each bullet, and a consequence in front of it. Thornton, for example, only shoots at members of the Bunch, distinguishing him from the rest of the bounty hunters, who shoot indiscriminately. In Agua Verde, on the other hand, the action is much more confused. We see the gun fired but have no idea where its bullets are landing, we see the Bunch hit but don’t know who shot them. The machine gun is so powerful that the men cannot manipulate it: the Western hero’s hallmark – his mastery of his weapon – is shattered. The new weapon is ferocious: when Lyle Gorch (Warren Oates) fails to take control of the gun he lets out a final, primal scream as he showers the town in bullets before dying. Bishop, the dominant male, manages to subdue it for a few seconds (“give ‘em hell, Pike!” Dutch screams), before he crumples and dies with his finger on the trigger and his face obscured by his hat. It is neither the Bunch nor the West that is untameable anymore, it is the machines.
In San Rafael, through carefully edited sequences of close ups and slow-motion shots, individual deaths were given a moment of attention, of poignancy, of grace. In Agua Verde, though there is an abundance of slow-motion shots, individual deaths do not receive the same attention. The men fall hard and fast – the graceful duel, the draw and death of the classic Western is replaced with piles of bodies. In a Western, Buscombe argues, “to be justifiable, the violence must be redemptive: it must produce a transformation in human affairs that is clearly ‘progressive’ in some sense.”There is no redemptive value here; when the machine gun stops firing there isn’t even a society left. The violence wrought by a machine gun is not a violence that can be endorsed by Western codes, because it is so impersonal and so destructive. And so the arrival of this violence in the Western renders all else impotent. For Peckinpah the Wild West is dead because it is impossible for it to survive in a world with these machines.
Terrence Malick, on the other hand, does not present the relationship between mechanization and the Wild West as so oppositional. Days of Heaven is set in a similar time (1916) and place (the Texas Panhandle) as The Wild Bunch, but where, in Peckinpah’s world, the codes of the Western dictate how we read the film, in Days of Heaven an understanding of these generic codes actually shows how the film is aggressively moving away from the Western. Malick’s film reads like an attempt to remove the Western from the West, to demythologize a landscape whose culture has been dominated by the cowboy. Malick is interested in the idea of the Wild West and the effects of mechanization, but is also interested in challenging the ideological underpinnings of the Western’s generic conventions.
After the opening credits, the film cuts to darkness before there is a dramatic aural crescendo of rhythmic beating. We are inside a steel mill: it is loud, dark and dirty and the only light in it comes from the blindingly hot furnace the men line up to shovel coal into. They circle back to repeat their endless jobs. We are deep in the heart of the machine and the noise overwhelms the language of the workers – stripping them of individuality and of community. We are unable to hear the argument between Bill (Richard Gere) and his foreman, we do not know why Bill strikes him down.
Afraid he has killed the foreman, Bill, his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) and his sister (Linda Manz) head for the West. This move from the corrupt, mechanized cities of the East to the (potentially) nurturing natural state of the West is a common theme in the Western, and with one striking shot Malick teases his audience with the suggestion that we could be headed for a familiar Western landscape. To get out of the city, the trio jump onto a train, which once again represents the bridge between civilization and wilderness, poverty and prosperity, stifling urban life and the expanse of the frontier. The contrast between city and nature is immediately highlighted by the look and sound of their exodus from the darkness and cacophony of the steel mill to the Texas Panhandle. Linda Manz’s voice-over tells us “all three of us have been going places. Looking for things, searching for things, going on adventures,” and we cut to a screen filled by a strikingly blue sky, with just the silhouette of a suspension bridge slicing across the middle. The sky dominates the mise-en-scène but the train – cutting across the frame from right to left – is instantly recognizable. On the soundtrack we have moved from Saint-Säens delicate Aquarium to Enderlin and the jangling optimism of Leo Kotke’s banjo. Locomotives, blue sky country, banjos, economic opportunity, an escape from urban squalor, ‘adventures’ – everything in this shot points towards the Western. The reliable train is taking them away from their troubles and towards the West, towards their future.
On arrival at the farm, however, the tone and texture of the film changes dramatically: Ennio Morricone’s score begins, but it is not the sparse whistling made so famous by the Leone Westerns, instead it is a rich, graceful arrangement of swelling violins and flutes – a clear subversion of the audience’s generic expectations.
The image, too, is subverted: the sky is no longer bright blue but a glowing white. Malick and the director of photography, Nestor Almendros, both felt a blue sky “makes landscapes look like picture postcards or vulgar travel brochures,”and so the sky was made to appear “white and burnt out.” Rather than the familiar blue/yellow palette of the colour Western, then, this is a film of golds, greys and whites. The Texan fields are captured with a tone that feels both naturalistic and highly cinematic,and so both the image and score are stripped of the Western signifiers so briefly gestured to on the train journey. The West we have arrived in feels neither so wild nor so well-trodden.
The train journey is the first of many Western conventions that are highlighted only to be exploded. Joan McGettigan demonstrates how “in a series of reversals, the film introduces and even elevates characteristics of the Western, and then reveals them as illusions.” These characteristics include the intrinsic value of labour, the benefits of community, masculine heroism and the value of revenge/justice. They are all reversed to some degree. Itinerant workers arrive on well-cultivated land and toil for “the richest man in the panhandle;” there is no community between them; the Farmer (Sam Shepherd) is distant and exploitative while Bill is proud, selfish and cowardly, and when the Old Man (Robert Wilke) avenges the Farmer’s murder, it amounts to little more than Bill being shot in the back. This is not a film concerned with lamenting the ‘death of the Wild West’, it is a film that attempts to expose the economic realities behind the Hollywood myth.
In Peckinpah’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) we see the Jeffersonian ideal of the small landowner realized, a celebration of the dictum that “those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God.” Hogue becomes the ideal homesteader: showing dominion over nature by “finding water where it wasn’t,” economic individualism by setting up ‘Cable Springs,’ and potential for the future in his relationship with Hildy. Peckinpah makes the current impossibility of this dream clear, though, as Cable is run over by a car and dies in the end. The West of Days of Heaven, though, is rather different: it is one of exploitation and poverty, it is no longer full of possibility; the frontier is closed, all the land is claimed and there is nothing on which to build for the future. In tone and in content, then, Malick moves away from the codes of the Western and tries to present the economic realities of the 1910s, to demythify the West in popular culture so that we can begin to engage with it historically.
As in The Wild Bunch, machines in the Panhandle are incongruous against their backgrounds. The train pours out thick black smoke; the tractors dominate the plains; the spluttering airplanes startle us; and Bill’s bright red motorcycle stands out proudly against the golden fields. But, unlike automobile in The Wild Bunch, Malick does not foreground the machines. In the fields, they are new but they are neither threatening nor alien. However, we have already seen the inside of an industrialized world in the steel mill, and know that it is not something to look forward to.
As Bill and Linda struggle through collecting the first harvest, the voice-over tells us that if “you didn’t work they’d ship you right outta there. They don’t need you. They can always get somebody else.” Like parts of a machine, the workers are easily interchangeable. We cut to three tractors trundling across the screen. While this cut may imply that the machines are replacing the labourer it is also demonstrates how they are making the harvest easier. Before the tractors arrived the workers struggled to heave their loads onto horse-drawn carts. Malick cuts to the couple’s faces to show us they are exhausted. Then, the tractors enter, and are followed by a series of considerably more relaxed workers. When the work is done, the labourers cheer and the tractors sound their horns and shoot jets of steam in the air; the machines are celebrating along with the people. If the problems presented by the film are the inequality of wealth and the impossibility of economic salvation, then it is not simply mechanization that is being held to blame. The machines are just the latest tool of the wealthy.
Where Peckinpah shows mechanization as progressively increasing humans’ capacity for violence, Malick shows violence as quick, simple and mute. The Farmer threatens Bill with a gun, but Bill kills him with a screwdriver: the primal easily overcomes the mechanical. Malick locates the fault in human agency. The conclusion of the film finds the two men dead because both their motives were essentially acquisitive. Mechanization’s role, rather, is in its capacity to assist in the acquisition of wealth. With control over machinery the Farmer has clearly been very economically successful. But Malick, instead, is showing how the possibility of achieving a Jeffersonian ideal of individualism has been exaggerated by the Hollywood Western. The Wild West never died because it never really existed, people were never really free in America, because someone wealthier has always set up shop first.
Badlands opens in South Dakota in the 1950s, in the kind of grid town widely deployed as America sububarbnized. Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) sees himself as a modern-day cowboy, but he is a character who has invested so heavily in the generic conventions of the Western that he finds himself unable to function in 1950s society. He spends the film trying to re-find the genre, to reawaken it. He tries to cast himself as a movie cowboy: he wears the classic boots and jeans, models himself on James Dean and lists his skills as riding, shooting and not minding the cold. He loses his job as a garbage man and when he is given one at a ranch, he tells his girlfriend Holly (Sissy Spacek) – nonchalantly – that he’s “going to work as a cowboy now…or thinking about it.” When we see him at work, he is working a cattle crush, trapping a cow’s head in a vice while it is branded. The reality of life does not meet Kit’s generic expectations.
Resolution, in a Western, is so often brought about by violence that it is not surprising how quickly Kit resorts to it – killing Holly’s father (Warren Oates) for not treating him like the star he thinks he is. As in Days of Heaven, the violence has a muted quality which, compared to Peckinpah, feels distinctly unWesternized: it is not impressive, or stylized: it is quick and simple. Recognizing that the neat, grid town is not an arena in which he can realize his generic aspirations, in which he can behave like a cowboy and be respected for it, Kit and Holly head for the forest. Like John Wayne at the end of Stagecoach (1939), Kit shuns civilization in the hope he can create a world in which his view of himself retains some potency – but they never truly shun the modern. They head to the woods but they don’t go too far – while Kit fishes, a truck passes by, and Malick’s script tells us “this stretch of river seems dangerously close to civilization.”They take a series of domestic articles with them; modern items like a lamp, radio and gramophone. Holly reads to Kit about the Kon-Tiki and its failed attempt to sail to Polynesia,and we foresee that they are beginning a similarly doomed venture to free themselves of their reliance on machines. Holly tells us how they, like the Kon-Tiki, built their house using indigenous materials, but in their daily activities they still rely on their modern appliances. They dance to the gramophone and when Kit tries to catch a fish with a net made from branches and fails repeatedly, he resorts to shooting at it. Then, when Holly looks through the stereopticon at pictures of older civilizations, we realize that this generation’s primary access to the past is through technological innovation, that their sense of the past is as viewed through a lens. Kit identifies with only with images of the West and the ideas of the Western. Though he believes he is structuring his identity in opposition to the society around him, although he sees himself as an outlaw figure, he is clearly also buying into the cultural models of the time. As Malick explains in a rare interview: “he thinks of himself as a successor to James Dean – a Rebel without a Cause – when in reality he’s more like an Eisenhower conservative.”Kit is caught in a cultural cattle crush – the increasingly pervasive mass culture of the time presents him with an image that, as an American, he is expected to invest in personally. The Western claims to celebrate his country’s birthing pains, the price men paid for freedom and their individual rights, it is a laudatory tradition of the endeavour and bravery of American men. But such paragons of libertarian masculinity that it presents are both impossible and dangerous to emulate, and so Kit finds himself at odds with the world around him.
While it is for comfort that they take a lamp and radio to the forest, the car is essential to their survival, and with it they head into the plains of South Dakota in a final, desperate search for a genuine wilderness, a real frontier. They head off the road, breaking away from the tarmacked, town-linking web of urbanization, their “last link with social order,” and drive through the open, dusty plains. But they are never able to leave the mechanical markers of civilization behind – they follow the telephone wires during the day and at night Holly locates herself by reference to “the gas fires at Missoula” and “the lights of Cheyenne.” Unlike John Wayne, who finds and claims his land at the start of Red River, there will be no point where they can stop and say “this is it,” no land where they can start again, from which they can start their own Western. Rather, they have to keep heading to Canada and what Holly calls “a magical land beyond the reach of the law.”
Still in Montana, Holly spots a train “making its way silently across the plain, “like the caravan in The Adventures of Marco Polo.” She relates how “it was our first taste of civilization in days, and I asked Kit if we could have a closer look.” Imaginatively linked to history, exploration and adventure, they wait for the train. When it arrives in shot, the iconic locomotive has been replaced by a viciously fast silver bullet that bursts in and out of the screen, leaving the pair to stand on the tracks and watch it disappear. What had been so richly symbolic for characters in The Wild Bunch and Days of Heaven is now untouchable. It is a reminder of the modern world carrying on without them, that the ‘badlands’ they wander through have already been tamed and signals, beyond any doubt, that we are not, and can never be, in a Western.
What is central to Malick’s two films, then, is that the Wild West was a myth, and that it is a myth that needs to be dispelled. It is a myth endorsed and perpetuated by directors like Peckinpah who work firmly within its codes and confines. Peckinpah laments the death of the Wild West, the passing of “a different America,” and firmly relates that death to the rise of mechanization. But while Peckinpah was fiercely critical of the society he lived in, there is little in his films that actually critiques the social order. As Robin Wood suggests, “Peckinpah’s work…witnesses the predicament of the artist who is vociferously anti-Establishment yet lacks any defined ideological alternative.”Peckinpah saw the Western as “a universal frame within which it is possible to comment on today” but he did not see the ways in which subscription to that genre also reinforced the inequalities and myths of control of his day. This subscription to the ideologies of the Western is the kind of cinematic heritage Malick is trying to counter.
Walter Benjamin argues that film’s “social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of cultural heritage.” America has always invested in the Western as part of its foundational mythology. But in Malick's hands, the ideals of the West are stripped of their romance, leaving only the darkly practical: the violent individualism, the primacy of private property, the hopeless expansionism. Both Peckinpah and Malick have deep issues with contemporary American society. But while Peckinpah rails against his present by glorifying a past that never was, Malick dissects his society's collective, cinematic memory to show how the problematic ideals and values of the present are maintained through the past's manufacture. Peckinpah wants to believe that something vital and true about his world was lost in modernity. Malick knows that America lost whatever purity it had when European boots first trod on her soil.
Maydoum is the film I began work on after leaving the London Film Academy in 2008. I wrote it with my mother, the novelist Ahdaf Soueif - the idea being that the film would be a prequel to her new novel. Three years later, the film is now online, but the book is still mostly in her head.
We shot the scenes in Cairo in late '08, and then followed up in London with a different crew in summer '09. The shoot was hugely interesting and very testing - I was hospitalized by a falling brick, Khalid got swine flu, whole tracks of sound didn't get recorded etc. But it was my first time working in Egypt, so it was all very exciting. And everyone worked incredibly hard on it with me, almost always without being paid anything - so for that it was a great experience.
The film premiered in competition at the 2010 Dubai Film Festival. It then played at three more (Detmold, Adana, National Geographic) and maybe could have done more. But in times of revolution the ultra-laborious festival submissions process is deeply unappealing, so I decided I'd rather let it begin its online life, and hope that it finds an interested audience out there.
So I haven't managed to write anything for a while. After what happened at Maspero, it's hard not to feel like imagework is pretty useless. But everyone's got to keep doing their part and hope that the collective effort is stronger than rampaging APCs.
So this is a little of what we've been engaged in at Mosireen, Cairo's new, independent media centre. The first video got played on TV a few times and is being held up as part of the proof that the Army shot at people.
We're working on something longer that will hopefully be ready by the end of this week.
Amidst all the death, if there's anything to be thankful about it is, again, that we live in an age where crimes are easily recorded. We collected all the most relevant videos here. They paint a pretty damning picture.
The battleground now is over transmission. What can one do other than post videos on Youtube? I've been told ONTV did a survey and found that 85% of households in Egypt only watch State Television. The same state television that were imploring people to "defend the Army from armed Christians." Meanwhile, on the satellite channels, Mona Shazly read straight from the Army playbook in the SCAFshow - asking them why they hadn't "taken control" of the Ministry of the Interior and blocking Ibrahim Eissa from asking anything even remotely uncomfortable while Yousri Fouda has taken himself off air because he wasn't allowed Alaa al Aswany on his talk show. The spaces for dissent are being shrunk every day.
We continue to push online as hard as possible, and burn DVDs to be distributed, but our reach is short. Talk is in the air now of setting up a new, publicly owned television channel. We'll see if we can still carve out and protect a space for free speech yet.
****
In other news, I just discovered that Shadi Abd el Salam's masterpiece, The Night of Counting the Years, is available free online. So if you want to forget about SCAF for a couple of hours, here's an option. Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation recently restored a print, but this isn't it. It's pretty grainy (though not as grainy as the embed still would have you believe), but it'll do until we can get a copy of the restored version online.
I am only now beginning to truly appreciate the revolutionary power of the digital camera. I'm on an analogue film workshop in Athens, working on 16mm and a Steenbeck, and - my God - it's painful.
I usually work with the lightweight Canon 7D and Final Cut. This week I'm lugging 10kg of Soviet engineering might around a city still burning under the summer sun during the day and spending my nights sweating half to death in bathrooms-cum-chemical-labs before settling down to stare at my plastic bag of sliced up rushes that I'm slowly sewing together with tape. It's laborious, to say the least. Whatever film I end up with is not going to be any good.
Soviet engineering might
At a talk at the Frontline Club in London I was asked what the most important piece of technology was for me during the Egyptian Revolution. My Canon 7D I replied. And that feels truer now than ever. The rise of the citizen journalist is an essential part of the global shifts we're going through, and digital photography - alongside the internet - is right at the heart of it.
From filming through Israeli checkpoints to illicit gold prospecting camps in the Sudanese desert the new Canon cameras have made everything possible. You can keep it running all day, have it sitting on a table, hidden in a bag, or just tie it up tight so it sits high on your chest, walk a little bit like the Terminator, and film away. You'll have to edit away a lot of crap, but Final Cut makes that easy enough.
With a Krasnogorsk it is impossible not to be conspicuous. It's huge, you have to crank it up, measure the light, open the aperture to carefully focus, then close it again. Then, if the world hasn't notice you yet, you press film and it sounds like a small machine gun is going off in your hand. You can film for three minutes and then you have to unload and reload a new film. It's a nightmare.
Of course, for decades people managed. You use the technology available to you. But for the young, the poor and the socially engaged the digital democratisation of film making has been remarkable for its rapidity and its almost instant accessibility. The control of the moving-image narrative, for so long firmly in control of those with power and resources, is now open for everyone to compete over.
On the day of the Camel Battle (February 2nd 2011), for example, all the international journalists covering the Egyptian Revolution were locked up in the Ramses Hilton by nightfall. But with four batteries and five memory cards in my bag I was able to film through the whole day and night. After picking up a lot of views on YouTube it was played several times on satellite TV channels to counter the Counterrevolution's claims that the people in Tahrir were funded and equipped by 'foreign agents'. This is my tiny, personal example, but there are countless others. The videos of police brutality that began circulating on Bluetooth several years ago, the Palestinian documentation of settler abuse in al Khalil (Hebron), the capture of Iranian protestor Neda Soltan bleeding to death. Nearly everyone has a camera on their phone, at least, and so has a role to play.
Cinematically, film still has a role to play. It has a quality that comes from the burning of reality straight on to chemistry, has a texture, a character. But to engage with, and hope to affect change in, the world, we are living in a time of almost unlimited possibility for the civilian.
PS If anyone from Canon reads this and wants to support the work we're doing in Egypt, specifically with Mosireen, the new citizen journalist's collective, we could take on a technology partner.
