Global Activists in Film

For 113 years, the most consistent global activists have been filmmakers When Auguste and Pierre Lumiere screened their 50-second film THE ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN AT LA CIOTAT STATION which shows a steam engine arriving at a railway station, the audience, terrified by the size of the image, ran to the back of the room. In this, and films like WORKERS LEAVING THE FACTORY, the Lumieres' revolutionary contribution was not only to project the moving image, but to give people images of themselves. Thousands of interesting, great, provocative, challenging films made since the Lumiere Brothers' first films in 1895 have gone on to do the same, often with an increasing sense of provocation. Yet one principle remained the same: to reflect images to the public, the filmmaker as the devil incarnate, holding up the magical mirror so that we can better see and perhaps understand ourselves.

That provocation may not always be so clear. In the early films of Hungarian director Bela Tarr, it's hard to see what was so controversial in the stories of bleak, unhappy people arguing and struggling in the grey shadows of a depressing Hungary . Yet it was daring to show things as they were; the hopelessness of a soulless existence under Communist domination.

There is similar provocation in the incredibly rich and largely undiscovered classic Romanian cinema, in a great retrospective now at the Gene Siskel Film Center . In the best-known Romanian film, 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year, it is not the backroom abortion which is so much the political issue. It is the ease with which the pregnant student is willing to betray her friend, the casualness with which people's bodies and loyalties are bought and sold. In the film, bourgeois complacency – which represents the way out of the personal humiliation and poverty of socialism – involves a personal compromise which may be  personally untenable and too high a price to pay.

What was the filmmaker, Cristian Mungiu, trying to do here if not to spur the world into action against lies and dishonesty which corrupt the world and make it an unjust, dangerous and sometimes deadly place for the innocent?

In Li Yang's Chinese film, BLIND MOUNTAIN , the very simple story centers on a young woman from the provinces who, tricked into thinking she is getting a decent paying job, instead ends up in a remote Chinese village in a forced marriage that is close to slavery. What makes the film affecting is not the lurid melodrama or that this kind of bondage exists in a world power determined to show its modern face through the new boutique architecture of Beijing, but the young woman's resilience.

The images that these filmmakers capture strip the false veneer off manufactured history – they dig underneath the scabs of injustice. The image the French preferred at the end of World War II was that they all served in the Resistance, fighting the Occupation. Yet the great film about the holocaust, Alain Resnais' NIGHT AND FOG, cited by Roberto Rossellini as the most important film of the post-war years, ran into trouble with the French censors. A single image was the point of confrontation. Resnais had to mask the cap of a French policeman who was supervising the deportation of the Jews. The cap was the giveaway sign that the man was a member of the French police. This, in turn, implied that the French police collaborated in the holocaust.

The French were not the only image-phobic conservators of their manufactured historical legacy. Where are the images that connect us to Iraq or Burma or Darfur ? In these cases, filmmakers are often unable to gain access – to capture the very images we need to see. Deprived of specificity, they turn to the generic. Iraq becomes a dusty alley which could be in any town in the Mideast, Burma a rice paddy seen from the air, Darfur a group of hungry villagers standing before a voyeuristic camera. The layers of truth are reduced to stereotypical kitsch and thus made ineffective. They lose their power, just as the French cop who vanished into anonymity once his signature cap was obliterated from NIGHT AND FOG.

Milos Stehlik's commentaries reflect his own views and not necessarily those of Facets Multimedia, Worldview or Chicago Public Radio.