Lucidno
In 1945, Netherlands reacted to Indonesia’s demand for independence by carrying out a massacre. The Dutch colonial powers massacred approximately 150,000 Indonesians including women and children between the years 1945-1949. Rawagede Massacre is only one of the massacres among many others. In 1947, Dutch soldiers murdered 430 people on a single day in the Java Island of Indonesia.
During the colonization period, 550,000 people were made slaves and there was slave trade. Most of these slaves were made to work in the farms located at the colonies of Netherlands and in the households of the aristocrats.
In 1740, Dutch colonial soldiers murdered more than 10,000 Chinese within 10-12 days in the coastal city of Batavia in today’s Jakarta. The first Dutch colony in North America was established in Fort Nassau in 1615. At first, Dutch people were engaged in fur trade since it was more profitable. As the number of Dutch settlers increased starting from 1640, the scope of the massacre committed against the natives grew in magnitude as well. The Dutch settlers murdered the settlers that sought refuge. Children aged 5-6 were forcefully taken from their mothers. Some of them were thrown into fire and some of them were thrown into rivers. The Dutch East India Company employed slaves from Madagascar, Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka. At certain periods, it was seen that there were 200 slaves for a Dutch in the colonies.
The Belgian soldiers in Congo were provided with a certain amount of bullets. Soldiers would take the severed hands of the natives that they killed so as to prove that they didn’t waste the bullets allotted to them. In case their bullets didn’t reach their target, they cut the hands of those natives who were still alive. Years after these, King Leopold defended his actions in Congo by saying that ‘these were duties that a Christian had to carry out.’ When these events were revealed to the people in the beginning of 1900s, the European countries criticized King Leopold, held a council, and decided that Congo should not be the private property of King Leopold and become a colony of the state of Belgium instead. The private companies that came in the aftermath of these developments displayed even more ruthless methods.
Algeria became a French colony in 1830. When the people of Algeria rebelled against the French colonial administration, French people deployed 400,000 soldiers in the country so as to suppress the rebellion. During 130 years that the French colonial administration reigned in Algeria, many disinterested French authorities voiced the persistent persecution of their own country. The French colonial forces organized air strikes and ground attacks to a few cities in the east, especially to Sétif and Guelma in an attempt to suppress the rebellion. These tight measures lasted for a few days and caused the death of 45,000 people according to the Algerian state. The European historians recorded this number as around 15,000 to 20,000. The French attacks were not limited to Algerian lands, but they also continued in France. The Paris massacre in 1961 is the bloodiest example of this. On October 17th, the French police opened fire to the unarmed Algerian demonstrators who demanded to be independent from the French colonial administration.
I have just copied a couple of different news that amount to thousands of pages on different websites by shortening them. If you really want to, then you can find much more with regards to the abuses of human rights and about massacres that were committed in the history of Italy, Spain, and Portugal. The Portuguese people sent two millions slaves to Europe, North America, and Brazil between 1400 and 1600 from the Gold Coast. Following them, the British took over this operation. You know this geography: The Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast. These should also stick in our minds, in our memories after the festivals so as to address and remember them in our lifetimes and in the stories, films, and lectures that we would like to deliver to people, to share with them. If the building blocks of our cultural memory are just a loosely pieced together depiction of the third world countries, then it doesn’t make much sense. This sort of one-sided information reminding us the answers that are given to the questions asked during the quiz shows on TV is also dangerous for creating the illusion that this useless information is indeed useful.
Let’s say that the festivals make very right and fair selections thanks to which the real big picture can be clearly seen. Let’s say that the Western filmmakers present the problems that emerge due to their own countries’ actions in a very clear manner and by employing a right historical perspective. Another thing that is as important as these and is also capable of undermining the idea that this essay defends is the fact that if it weren’t for some of the Western filmmakers, some of the problems of the Third World wouldn’t have been put on the screen at all. I sincerely believe that there are many news and documentaries that can prove this point. It is fortunate that these documentaries exist and that they tell what Nestle does in the Ivory Coast and what Shell does in Nigeria. Even though we thoroughly consider the counter examples for the ideas presented in this essay, we still arrive at the following conclusion: All these problems that are related to ecological destruction and exploitation have a serious connection with the concept of ‘being giant, big’ As Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar wonderfully illustrate in their documentary called the Corporation (a wonderful documentary that I use in my lectures and many of my friends from different disciplines use in their own lectures as additional course material) corporations such as Nestle, Coca Cola, Shell, BP, Exxon, Monsanto, Levis, Nike, HM, Dupont, De Beers, Calgary Gold Mining, Swiss Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ford, Mercedes, and Volkswagen try to sustain their power and increase their profits, and while doing these, they exploit the resources of the world with great recklessness. We know that Exxon (and probably some other oil companies) obtained certain scientific data and future projections regarding global warming in 1970s but chose to keep these data hidden. We know that they do not see the melting glaciers and the future of the world as such problematic at all. What they see is an opportunity to be seized. They thought that they could transfer oil much more easily in this way and they even started to build a ship for this purpose. The underlying reason for the Exxon Valdez Tanker accident that took place in Alaska is probably this line of thinking. Jill Godmillow’s film What Farocki Thought provides detailed and concrete information regarding Dow Chemical. The chemical engineers of this company that has produced the napalm bomb, achieved to start a fire that cannot be extinguished and that burns right to the bone in human flesh. Dow Chemical has been supporting many biennials, festivals, and different artistic activities for a long time. In the meanwhile, the photograph of the girl running from her village with her flesh on fire because of the napalm bomb has been one of the most seen photographs of the world. In a sense, this photo is one of the important reasons that helped end the dirty war that the US waged in Vietnam. Prof. Dr. Ismail Duman is one of the leading names in the monumental resistance of people put up against the process of extracting gold by using cyanide in the ancient city of Pergamon (Bergama) (I should also mention esteemed names such as Prof. Dr. Friedheim Corte, Prof. Dr. Müller, Prof. Dr. Emür Henden, Prof. Dr. Sevki Filiz, Prof. Dr. Ümit Erdem and many other valuable people). Ismail Duman once said the following: ‘The gold, which is found underground and pose no threat to the nature, is put through many chemical processes during which chemical materials such as plumb and arsenic are also awakened, and they contaminate the water and air, disturb the natural balance, and pose serious threats to the health of human beings and environment.’ Native Americans also uttered very similar sentences for a year regarding an oil pipeline extending from Canada into the USA, and this pipeline burst last year. 500,000 liters of oil contaminated the soil and water. Ismail Duman continued his words as follows: ‘The gold that is extracted from underground is then put in the underground vaults of the central banks.’ And it is the environment from where this gold is extracted and people living in that environment that has to live with the horrible consequences of this process. We see that what is at work here is a terrible and recurring process that lays the foundation for exploitation through socialization of risk and privatization of profits. How is this possible? What makes this possible is the history of centuries-old colonization practices. The authorities and people who are in charge are convinced to do nothing, intimidated, and purchased. How could this be done? You can easily do these if you are a company called Normandy Poseidon. You can do these if you have the resources of Nestle, Good Year, Exxon, Shell, BP, Nike, HM… When we look at the current problems of the world, you can see the huge multinational companies in the dimly lit area in the background. Who are these multinational companies? Are they based in Ghana, Somali, Chad, Burundi, or Yemen? Of course, they are not. They are based in the US, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain… The problems that seem to have no solution now (it is possible to say this for the near future as well) are rooted in the developed countries and their uncontrolled, amorphous corporations. These corporations rule the world and also lead the way in spreading this horrible disease, this virus of capitalism to countries such as China, and thereby in spreading this mutant virus to the entire world. Is it possible to arrive at this long and painful sentence from the independent festivals? I highly doubt it.
Let’s not deceive ourselves by thinking that there are more people now who put up resistance. For the first time in the world, the cruise ships surpassed the threshold of two million dollars in 2016. In my opinion, there are now more people who are dead to the world and who are stupefied. Paolo Pisanelli’s Good Morning Taranto (Italy, 2014, 84’), Alberto Vendemmiati and Lazaretti’s war films, Christopher Walker’s Spears From All Sides (Ecuador, USA, 2018, 90’), The Milk System by Andreas Pichler (Germany, Italy, 2017, 91’), Su Rynard’s Messenger (Canada, France, 2015, 90’), Teresa Camou Guerrero’s Sunu (Mexico, 2015, 85’), and Cotton Dreams by Sandeep Rampla Balhara (Poland, India, 2014, 15’) are great documentaries that can easily prove my arguments wrong. However, these great documentaries along with many other great ones that I haven’t seen fall short of changing the big picture that I have been referring to. These great works that require a lot of sacrifice cannot fix the big picture because they are not many in number, because they cannot reach to many people, because they are not screened in many venues, and because they lack continuity.
The essential term in the formation of personal or collective (social) memory is not remembering as people might think but forgetting. As individuals, we generally don’t know this, forget about it, or just overlook it. It is not a significant aspect of an individual life’s anyway, not even an issue that is worthy of consideration. When these two verbs (to remember and to forget) are used in their passive forms, nothing changes for the community engineers (for the imams/priests/rabbis, scientists, television people, politicians, educators, artists, athletes, the significant apparatuses of the multinational corporations…). What matters for them is to make people forget. They achieve this by continuously reminding and showing people what is unnecessary and exaggerated. In this process of creating illusions, documentary genre has done its part and has thereby turned into a quite polluted format. However, this process of pollution of the documentary happened very easy and quick.
Why does making people forget is the first priority of the community engineers? It is because you can’t change what happened. Two heroes named Deniz Gezmiş and Che Guevara emerged and they had a huge impact on their society and changed the world with their actions, virtues, and courage. They had a lasting place in their countries’ histories and were persecuted, and then killed. What matters is to make people forget that. As we said in the beginning, one cannot change what happened. Making people forget them is not possible only through making documentaries on different subjects. These two figures have not been forgotten against all the attempts to achieve this. However, the community engineers generally work collectively knowingly or unknowingly. While History Channel shows a documentary titled Che infused with outright lies, Turkey’s state channel TRT never gets tired of broadcasting those hackneyed, old tales for the grown-ups in the documentary format.
Bertolt Brecht states, ‘What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?’ But let alone these nuanced questions, the common people are in no position to even ask a question since the community engineers have so radically severed the roads leading to truth. In this process of making people forget, documentary has lost its designated place assigned by the social engineers to the advertising industry, and came in second. The role of the ‘brave representatives of the truth’ that is embraced by the documentary filmmakers with great pride is actually an exaggeration except for a handful of really brave individuals.
As a last word, I would like to say a few words about the following issue. Let’s try to look at each documentary that is filmed and shown each year by adapting a way of looking shown in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-up. Consider all of the films from 2019 as a painting on the wall and think of yourself as someone who looks at this painting from the right distance. The small list of documentaries that I included in this essay at the price of doing injustice to many others will definitely fall short of fixing the big picture and will unfortunately get lost in it. This is the real problem. With the intention of making my subjective considerations clearer and presenting a more comprehensive list including those genuine documentaries that get lost in the big picture, I kindly ask you to look at the films that have been chosen for the competition and screening sections of BIFED at www.bifed.org.
Deep thanks to Burcu Halaç for the translation.
Ethem Özgüven,
Ethem Özgüven studied Film and TV at Anadolu University and Marmara University. He is currently teaching CONTRA and Documentary at Bilgi University. As a documentary filmmaker, he has been exploring political and environmental resistance, human rights and labour rights movements since the 1990s. He created the concept of CONTRA as a critical approach for social responsibility campaigns. His documentaries and video art were screened in more than 50 countries in many major festivals and platforms. He is currently the coordinator of BIFED – Bozcaada International Festival of Ecological Documentary.
October 21, 2019
Translated By: Burcu Halaç
