Every Act of Struggle: What happened to the Bravery?

This double bill at Filmtheater Kriterion takes place in the context of de Appel’s current exhibition and research project, Every Act of Struggle: Inclusion and Assembly. The exhibition deals with the ways in which cultural institutions in the Netherlands navigate questions of historical violence and systemic injustice in the context of their colonial history. Artists have employed various strategies to urge these institutions to address these issues, often merging activism with their artistic practice. While some actions have brought these matters to public attention, much of the discourse continues to unfold in private, with many institutions adopting cautious or noncommittal stances. This current dynamic recalls earlier moments in history, namely the debates sparked by the cultural boycott of South Africa and the anti-apartheid movement of the 1960s through the 1980s in the Netherlands, when cultural institutions faced similar pressures to critically reflect on their roles. In this film programme we ask ourselves the question: What happened to the Bravery?

The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images (2011) by Éric Baudelaire
Language: English, Japanese, French / Subtitles: English

Who are May and Fusako Shigenobu? Fusako – leader of an extremist left-wing faction, the Japanese Red Army, involved in a number of terrorist operations – has been in hiding in Beirut for almost 30 years. May, her daughter, born in Lebanon, only discovered Japan at the age of twenty-seven, after her mother’s arrest in 2000. And Masao Adachi? A screenwriter and radical activist filmmaker, committed to armed struggle and the Palestinian cause, was also underground in Lebanon for several decades before being sent back to his native country. In his years as a film director, he had been one of the instigators of a ‘theory of landscape’ – fûkeiron: through filming landscapes, Adachi sought to reveal the structures of oppression that underpin and perpetuate the political system. Anabasis? The name given, since Xenophon, to wandering, circuitous homeward journeys.
It is this complicated, dark, and always suspenseful story that Éric Baudelaire chose to bring forth using the documentary format. Filmed on Super 8 mm, and in the manner of fûkeiron, contemporary panoramas of Tokyo and Beirut are blended in with archival footage, TV clips and film excerpts as backdrop for May and Adachi’s voices and memories. They speak of everyday life, of being a little girl in hiding, of exile, politics and cinema, and their fascinating overlap. All of which adds up not so much to an enquiry as a fragmented anamnesis.

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) by Johan Grimonprez
Language: English / No subtitles

Vietnam veteran Raffaele Minichiello went down in history as the world’s first transatlantic airline hijacker when in 1969 he forced a TWA pilot at gunpoint to fly from California to Italy. A great many revolutionaries, adventurers and terrorists have followed his example. is a brief history of plane hijacking made by Belgian artist Johan Gimonprez. The mix of news footage, science fiction clips, found footage and home videos shows how Minichiello’s imitators became increasingly extreme, and their actions more deadly. As well as being about terrorism in the pre-9/11 era, it is perhaps even more about the ever-increasing influence of the mass media. It starts with a quote from Don DeLillo’s novel in which a writer enters into dialogue with a terrorist. The writer argues that the airplane hijacker has displaced him in his ability to exert influence. Gimonprez, in turn, argues that radio and TV have hijacked terrorism. They have transformed it into a spectacle, which the director emphasizes by packing the soundtrack with sunny pop music. The film is disturbing and intense – and in the light of 9/11 surely also prophetic.

Tickets will soon be available through Kriterion's website.