Melissa Thackway and Biljana Tutorov, jury members for the Beeld en Geluid IDFA ReFrame Award at IDFA 2023, join TFV’s Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, the third member of the jury, in a discussion about the evolution of archives and IDFA’s controversial opening night.
THE FILM VERDICT: We have now seen about half of the films for the Reframe Awards, a lot of them related to war, strife, conflict. Are archives inevitably tied to tragedy, especially when they’re connected to a country’s history?
Biljana Tutorov: Now that we have several devices used by people to record events, the immediate association of archives to me is not tragedy. But judging by what we have seen in the films for our cross-section award. there is more tragedy for humanity and female bodies in particular. A lot of these violent events are orchestrated by men. I haven’t quite digested this impression yet. In my work, I am interested in the fabrication of archives. But the use of archives rhymes with big emotions. Unfortunately, nowadays, big emotions — remember that I am from the Balkan region — are a lot about tragedy. So even when the use of archives do not start from tragedy, it usually ends there.
TFV: Are there hierarchies in building archives?
Melissa Thackway: Absolutely. There is no such thing as objectivity. Archives come from the Greek word “archeion”, which means public records. Gatekeepers decided what goes in and what stays out, and who has access to those archives. So, there was already a system of power at play. Now that we can make our own archives, there is a de-hierarchisation of what is an archive and what isn’t. But even on the personal level, you are making choices when you choose what to keep. It is a construction.
BT: Also, the winners write the history. So, the concept of power is always present.
TFV: Melissa, you have done work with African filmmakers. What do you make of African filmmakers needing to produce money to use what is, in essence, their own history?
MT: It is a thorny issue. Let me share an anecdote. Back in the 1990s, it was possible to get material that wasn’t digitised and owned by a European institution. Jean-Marie Teno, the Cameroonian filmmaker, heard of some materials being held by the French army. He wanted to use them. Somehow, he was able to find a group of young men who were conscientious objectors and so instead of sending them off to war, the army put them in charge of sorting these archival materials. They gave him access to what he was asking without payment and without asking permission from their superiors. If he was to access and use those same materials today, he would have to pay thousands of euros per minute. It remains a thorny issue.
TFV: People who record themselves are usually trying to make themselves nice. Is that what is happening for countries when they are creating their archives?
MT: Yes. Even with some of the unflattering things we have seen. Many of those materials were created to make those countries look good. It is the film directors who have altered that perception for us. So it is great to be able to observe these multiple points of view. The ability to create multiple records brings us closer to objectivity than one source of truth.
With colonial archives, the colonisers were constructing an image they wanted for themselves as civilisers. “We are doing these wonderful things for you” and so on. We are now looking at it decades later with different eyes. We hear their message, but we now know what they were not showing. We now have more context. It’s important that now there are voices that can challenge the official discourse. As the African proverb goes, “Until the lions have their storytellers, the hunt will always glorify the hunter”.
TFV: With the inevitable coming of multiplicity of archives and interpretation, aren’t we courting chaos in the future?
BT: It’s complex. I’m not sure how the Babel of archives will evolve going forward. But the question I am most interested in is: what happens to the pictures we put in the public domain, but which are actually owned by private companies? I hope an integration is possible.
MT: I think the multiplicity of voices is not a problem. We have the ability to listen to more than one voice.
TFV: What about truth? Is truth important?
MT: What is truth? [Laughs]
BT: Whose truth? [Laughs]
TFV: When it was just the government and a small set of people providing interpretations, it was perhaps easier to arrive at a composite truth. It looks like we are heading into an amplified Rashomon.
BT: The problem is we don’t know how to read pictures. As documentary professionals, we come back to this.
MT: The problem isn’t that there will be too many archives; the problem is we aren’t taught how to contextualise and query images. If I see an image, I think, who made that image? What was the context? I put myself at a distance from it and I question it. I try to teach students how to ask these questions. I remember watching news of the Iraq War on British television and on French television. It was two different things because the French opposed the war and the British supported it. And it was the same event. I was getting this angle and that angle. So, you have to be able to think critically. Fake news is a problem because people see something and don’t question it. They just believe it. School doesn’t teach you to think critically—not in France.
TFV: Let’s bring this idea of the same event receiving different interpretations to IDFA 2023. The surprise pro-Palestine protest and Orwa Nyrabia’s clap on opening night has sparked quite a controversy. One side says the festival director meant one thing; the festival says he meant another. The video and photos from that night will be archived.
BT: We are in such a charged time that everything we do already constitutes an archive. But I was thinking about what happened that night, about what an image might say and not say. Sometimes the degree of light in a hall is not necessarily the degree of light in the photo. You can’t take a picture as a straight-up truth because there could be optical differences.
TFV: I was in the hall when the protest happened and was surprised at the unfair interpretation of Orwa’s clap. What does the controversy say about the power of images and their malleability?
MT: It shows the pernicious strength of images. They are so powerful and can be so misused. For example, the colonial authorities immediately understood the power of images when cinema was invented a decade after the Berlin Conference. They had to sell colonization to their people. So cinema has been in service of propaganda from the very start. All regimes — whether it’s Hollywood or the Soviet — have used cinema to convey their ideology.
TFV: In a few years, there will be documentaries on what is happening in Gaza right now. Some of the people making those films on both the Israel and Palestine sides will want to come to IDFA. What is a documentary festival’s role when there’s such charged material?
MT: Expanding the discourse around each film will be necessary. Maybe it is difficult at this moment for there to be a calm conversation. But in five years, the conversation will be different.
BT: There are fewer and fewer spaces in broadcast media that will provide space for both sides to debate. So a place like IDFA becomes an instrument of democracy. It will be important to emphasise the filmmakers’ Q&A to provide context. But unfortunately, not everybody is honest and everything can be manipulated. I learned a lesson from one of the documentaries we have watched: We always understand too late—after a lot of blood is spilled. After a lot of lives are lost.
