Austrian filmmaker and lecturer Hubert Sauper has devoted a large part of his film career to revealing how modern colonization, greed for profit and wars are eating away at Africa.
It is clear in the message that Americans, Europeans, Chinese exploit the natural resources of the cradle of humanity, everything from oil to fish, and in return they leave Africans with crumbs, ecological devastation and weapons. In the retrospective of the 25th documentary film festival dedicated to Sauper, we will be able to see four of his works: Diary is KisanganiaWe Come in Peace, Darwin’s Nightmare and The epicenter.
Hubert Sauper, known for political style documentaries cinema you believehe enters directly into the action with the camera, and yet he is not just a whim on the ceiling. He hangs out with people, questions them, provokes them, sets them up on a lie. In the end, they tell the story themselves. “This is not just another white man’s view on Africa,” wrote the French filmmaker and an anthropologist Jean Roach at Cooper’s the film Dnevnik from Kisangania from 1998. The action is set near the city where thousands of refugees found themselves after the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The world was silent about the humanitarian disaster. Sauper finds himself in the middle of a massacre he did not expect, and the result is an extreme film that also bears witness to his fears and confusion.
Sauper always chases the ratio between dimensions problems and individuals. With the views on hundreds stretched to the bone and ear-splitting coughing bodies that become numbers brings us back to the individual. It shows a person with emotions, desires, and we get the feeling that we are there, it comes completely close to the face, looking deep into the eyes with the camera. At the same time, like in other words, it builds a systemic picture of the long-term consequences of corruption involving corporations and politics and a population plunged into slavery. After the film We arrive in peace about the situation in Sudan, which Hubert Sauper filmed for six years, he is in favor LMU– film school and television in Los Angeles said that the making of documentaries could be characterized like the art of informing.
“Film is an art form. But of course it requires many skills, everything from literary to journalistic, scientific, anthropological. You’re trying to figure out what the hell people are doing and why, and also how some community understands and explains his the situation. However, we must be aware that information is not yet knowledge. A prerequisite for creating knowledge is inspiration. This can be compared to children learning when the mind and we stimulate the heart with intelligent questions, with the search for backgrounds and connections. The film is an alchemy of speech, sounds, images, everything strange that merges into a specific whole. This is, of course, incomplete because it never presents the whole truth. If you want to tell about the complexity of life, people, our time, you have to expose yourself to it. Knowing a lot is not always a simple thing. I used to come away from shooting my first films in Africa so distraught that I wished I had never gone.”
Darwin’s Nightmare from 2004, which also earned an Oscar nomination, takes us to the largest tropical lake on the world, Lake Victoria in Tanzania. Even small gestures turn out to be symbolic – on example, how the pilot of the Russian plane at the evening party in the camera’s view of the table rudely like a piece of meat pulls the Tanzanian Eliza, the party girl of many pilots. A few frames before that in such a manner on the ships are tossing huge Nile perch, which is actually the point problems, which squeezes the stomach. As artificially populated, they impoverished biodiversity, but became a big export business. And although the surrounding area is supposed to recover because of this, we see scenes of child disability, violence, general poverty and homelessness. The fish really stinks at the head. They catch 500 tons of fish in one place alone on day – two million meals for white people.
The locals are hungry. The catch is taken to Europe, but they don’t come with empty planes. They bring weapons that roam to the Congo, Rwanda, Sudan. like image on screen. “You know what war is like?” he asks in the 2020 Epicenter. “Most likely you only witnessed it through the hypnotic prism of film.” His habit is to address the viewer personally. This time it puts us in gear for a change on Kubo with a question: how film influences on political myth-making. It reaches more like a hundred years ago, when they invented the word utopia, which also means a beautiful place and non-place. Havana, heaven, has become the epicenter of three dystopias: the slave trade, colonization and globalization of power – the components of modern empire.
American war with the Spanish and the liberation of Cuba, which in fact had the motive of control in the background, was also fueled by film images of violence against American soldiers. Among them was, for example, models and a ship battle scene played with cigarette smoke like part of propaganda. In the Epicenter, Hubert Sauper gives voice to Cuban children, and although they sometimes sound like parol machines, on the other hand, turn out to be like thinking, critical people. Well, that our 12-year-olds don’t have to think about politics and availability of medicines is a privilege. And if the world may already know that Africa is a land of two faces – for tourists and for the other – it is colorful when smiling and dancing Kuba this more questionable.
From the show Go to the cinema.
Source: Rtvslo
