Week 16/2023

What does it mean to view filmmaking as a political act? Three filmmakers each approached militant cinema when they documented social struggle as an indictment, as a tool of contemporary historiography or as a laboratory of the future. 

In 1976, Barbara Kopple listened to the radio and heard about a miners’ association in Harlan County, USA, that was fighting for the right to have a union. She loaned some money and went to film the Miners for Democracy. Kopple’s involvement in the movement was not only through filming. She said: “We wore machine guns with semiautomatic carbines.”

Combining political activism, film criticism and filmmaking, the practice of Brazilian Glauber Rocha as an artist and activist was intertwined. Black God, White Devil (1964) accounts the story of a man who kills his corrupt employer and becomes an outlaw who starts to venerate a violent, self-proclaimed saint. Stoffel Debuysere wrote that “in Glauber Rocha’s work, the myths of the people, prophetism and banditism, are the archaic obverse of capitalist violence, as if the people were turning and increasing against themselves the violence that they suffer from somewhere else out of a need for idolization.”  

Relaxe (2022) is the first film of Audrey Ginestet, who is also a bassist in the band Aquaserge. The documentary is not about Aquaserge but about the band’s clarinetist, Manon Glibert, who was arrested in 2008 for ‘criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity’, sabotaging high-speed lines in France. What came to be known as the group the ‘Tarnac Nine’ consisted of five women and four men who moved to a rural area in France in order to live communally, away from consumerist society. Audrey Ginestet made a portrait of Manon while she prepares herself for her trial.  

Harlan County USA
Barbara Kopple, 1976
Harlan County USA , Barbara Kopple, 1976, 103’

In June 1973 the coal miners at Brookside, Kentucky voted to join the United Mineworkers of America. When the Eastover Mining Company refused to grant the United Mineworkers union recognition, a strike began which was to last 13 long months. This documentary tries to situate the strike within the history of miners’ struggles in the Appalachians and within more recent efforts to democratize the union.

EN

“Harlan County, USA; that was my first ever film that I did on my own. I worked on other people’s films doing sound and editing, but this for me was the very first. I started doing the during the time of Miners for Democracy. Arnold Miller won the Miners for Democracy and his first promise was to ‘organize the unorganized.’ In the early ‘70s in Harlan County, Kentucky, which had always been a place where you live and you die by your gun, they also had ‘Bloody Harlan County’ where people had fought for the right to have a union and many people died. An incredible woman named Florence Reece wrote a song called ‘Which Side Are You On?’ and it pertains to almost every single struggle, whether it’s a labor struggle or something else. Sometimes the verses have been changed, but she wrote that song. She also sang it in the ‘70s in Harlan County. [sings] ‘They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there. You’ll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair. Which side are you on? Which side are you on?’ That was the original.”

Barbara Kopple1

 

“Harlan County USA is a powerful documentary of a long and brave struggle. But it also shows the lack of theoretical foundations in the American labour movement. The underlying assumption seems to be that if the coal operators were simply more humane and recognised the workers’ “constitutional rights as American citizens’’ all would be well. There is no recognition that the American capitalist system may be at fault or that the mineWorkers of America have anything in common with other members of the working class. Their oppression is seen to flow from only one source - the mine owners and operators. The role of the state, and the church, indeed the whole system, is barely acknowledged.

This is all disturbing enough but in addition even latent feminism is absent at Brookside. The Harlan County women are shown as brave and forthright and it is fair to say that without their support the strike would have been lost. Their physical presence on picket lines, their arguments with judges and sheriffs, their arrests, their emotional support, and indeed their film, are all crucial. But these correct and courageous actions are almost entirely based on pure self-sacrificing principles. They have no independent demands and little awareness of their own particularly oppressed state as women.

The women may have won the strike at Harlan County hit both they and the United Mineworkers of America are in desperate need of political consciousness raising. Only then can past victories be firmly consolidated and future struggles more easily won.”

Kerry Schott2

  • 1Todd Melby, “Barbara Kopple discusses ‘Harlan County USA’,” The Drunk Projectionist, September 2018.
  • 2Kerry Schott, “Harlan County USA,” Spare Rib Magazine, July 1978.
screening
De Cinema, Antwerp
MORE INFO→ venues and hours
Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol
Glauber Rocha, 1964
Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol , Glauber Rocha, 1964, 120’

After killing his employer when said employer tries to cheat him out of his payment, a man becomes an outlaw and starts following a self-proclaimed saint.

EN

“Here’s my rifle to save the poor from starving”

Corisco

 

“What replaces the correlation of the political and the private is the coexistence, to the point of absurdity, of very different social stages. It is in this way that, in Glauber Rocha’s work, the myths of the people, prophetism and banditism, are the archaic obverse of capitalist violence, as if the people were turning and increasing against themselves the violence that they suffer from somewhere else out of a need for idolization (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, ‘Black God and White Devil’). Gaining awareness is disallowed either because it takes place in the air, as with the intellectual, or because it is compressed into a hollow, as with Antonio das Mortes, capable only of grasping the juxtaposition of two violences and the continuation of one by the other.”

Stoffel Debuysere1

 

“Brazil taught me to laugh. For me the comic is the height of intelligence. It is the Brazilians’ intelligence which makes them laugh. Of course I love the chanchadas [musical comedies, Trans.]. Of course I have replaced the ‘politique des auteurs’ by the ‘politics of friends’: Ah, how much I feel myself to be a friend of John Ford whom I have never met, and no doubt fortunately for me. Glauber Rocha would say to me: ‘My friendships are not psychological, they are epic.’ I find this statement fantastic.”

Sylvie Pierre2

  • 1Stoffel Debuysere, “The People are Missing”, Diagonal Thoughts, July 2012.
  • 2Bill Krohn, “Interview with Sylvie Pierre”, Senses of Cinema, December 2002.
screening
KASKcinema, Ghent
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Relaxe
Audrey Ginestet, 2022
Relaxe , Audrey Ginestet, 2022, 92’

Manon has been a defendant in the Tarnac case for ten years, accused with eight other people of participating in a terrorist undertaking while sabotaging high-speed lines in France. As their trial approaches, Audrey Ginestet takes her camera to join the group of women who helps Manon preparing her defense.

FR

« Une arrestation à son domicile, par 150 policiers cagoulés de la brigade antiterroriste. Quatre-vingt-seize heures de garde à vue. Deux semaines d’incarcération à Fleury-Mérogis. Un an sous contrôle judiciaire, avec signature hebdomadaire au commissariat de Limoges. Une interdiction de sortie du département de la Corrèze, et de voir les autres inculpés. Enfin, au bout du tunnel, et sans compter les jours, les nuits de peur et d’incertitude, trois semaines à 500 km de son domicile, de sa fille, de son foyer, pour assister à son procès. Voici quelques faits de la vie de Manon Glibert après sa mise en examen, le 11 novembre 2008, pour « association de malfaiteurs à visée terroriste et dégradation en réunion sur des lignes ferroviaires dans une perspective d’action terroriste ». Soit sa participation supposée à un acte de sabotage sur des caténaires de Haut-Clocher (Moselle), puis en 2009 sur un autre point de l’affaire dite « de Tarnac », du nom de la commune du plateau de Millevaches où Glibert a établi domicile dans une ferme en déréliction, le Goutailloux, et investi un commerce local, le Magasin général, pour le transformer en lieu de vie collective et de culture. »

Olivier Lamm1

 

« Relaxe est le premier long-métrage documentaire d’Audrey Ginestet, ingénieure du son, mixeuse, et également bassiste au sein du groupe Aquaserge. Devant la caméra, la principale protagoniste du film est Manon Glibert, qui joue de la clarinette dans le même groupe. Le film n’est pas un documentaire musical sur ce groupe, l’un des plus inventifs et exaltants de la scène française. Seule une séquence montre, incidemment, une séance de répétitions du groupe. 

Le film évoque un tout autre sujet, aux implications lourdes et aux ramifications tortueuses : la préparation du procès du dit « groupe de Tarnac » (tenu en mars 2018), dont faisait donc partie Manon. Information pas si connue que ça, même en suivant aussi attentivement la scène musicale contemporaine que l’actualité.

Même si l’on ne voit qu’à peine Aquaserge dans le film, convoquer la figure du groupe n’est pas si incongru. La musique d’Aquaserge est faite d’une matière sonore hybride et joyeuse, un free-rock qui n’a pas peur des morceaux longs, aime les ruptures de rythme, passe de la stase planante aux à-coups bruitistes, tout en scandant des hymnes oulipiens et des mots d’ordre dédiés au plaisir et à l’amitié. Bref, Aquaserge est un groupe insaisissable, rétif à toute étiquette, remodelant sans cesse ses propres formats. Et de loin en loin, au-delà de l’affaire Tarnac, Relaxe procède de la même logique. C’est un film qui déjoue les étiquettes et nourrit son écriture de son propre processus de recherche. »

Joachim Lepastier2

screening
Cinema Nova, Brussels
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