Whatever It Takes

What would a documentarist not do in order to reach his goal, to get those necessary interviews from the people he or she knows are the right ones. And everything is not bound to money. It is not always self-evident that people are available, and it takes both persuasion and creativity for the documentarist to get hold of the material. But where does exploitation begin?

It is said that the inner truth is not necessarily revealed by merely illustrating reality. For example Łoziński, who worked under the shadow of censorship and political terror, knows that. Reality taught him to provoke situations in front of the camera with the help of a person acting as a catalyst. “A neat aquarium needs to be shaken in order to reveal that it is not that clean. Fish start to swim in a different way...”

Enjoy your poverty. A neon sign glows obscenely in the middle of the desert in the Republic of Congo, as a blood-curling analogue of the famous slogan of Auschwitz, Arbeit macht frei. The provocation is obvious, at least to an average Western believing in democracy and human rights. The sign is set up by the Dutch Renzo Martens in his film Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty, after travelling to his chosen “heart of darkness”: a place torn by civil war, where peacekeepers protect the international mine business, reporters photograph dead rebels and starving children, where endless misery holds sway despite the presence of humanitarian organisations. Martens tries to convince the villagers that they need to suck money out of their poverty – the only thing they have got. He advises the locals to photograph the suffering instead of wedding pictures. By acting as a foul “bad guy”, he gives up the role of a kind director and joins the side of the “guilty ones”. Is Martens’ cynical-appearing work founded on genuine frustration, maybe despair? Maybe it is meant as an eye-opener, surely not as a joke?

Congo brings to mind East German Walter Heynowski’s and Gerhard Scheumann’s The Laughing Man – Confessions of a Murderer (1966), which was interpreted as a provocation and was banned for a long time in Western Germany. In the interviewing documentary made in a studio in Munich (sic), the renowned Nazi officer Siegfried Müller brags about his career as a mercenary in the Congo civil war. His murderous acts, lies and megalomania are revealed by the spine-chilling archive material the directors cut among their polite questions and the answers of Müller, who was getting drunk with Pernod drinks.

In the film Bassidji in DocPoint’s series, there is a completely different interview to which Mehran Tamadon has managed to persuade the members of the Iran militia organisation. Where Heynowski and Scheumann got the vain Nazi in front of the camera by hiding that they were part of the elite of DDR documentary film, the irreligious expatriate Iranian living in France revealed his cards before the dangerous game. Question by question, as if on knife´s edge, he closes on the most difficult subjects. Impressive is the long silence descending at the end of the group interview as Tamadon tries to phrase his last question in a manner that would not break the contact and shake the fatherly benign balance. His fear is clear and well-grounded. Tamadon honestly and curiously “asks in order to understand”. He thus offers with the means of documentary a rare chance to understand the way of thinking of Iran’s fundamental Muslims.

Elizabeth Marschan
Journalist, DocPoint Programme Consultant and Member of the Board

Translation by Sophy Bergenheim