CULTURE: Filmmakers Probe Multiple Identities, Partitions

• by Beena Sarwar (karachi)
• Tuesday, February 10, 2009
• Inter Press Service

Both, based in London, share a desire to explore identities and other issues arising from post-colonial partitions.

Nicole Wolf the German and Ali Mehdi Zaidi the Pakistani were among the artists, scholars and historians who discussed how visual artists could commemorate 2007, the 60th year of India’s Independence and Partition at a brainstorming session at the Royal Geographical Society in London, December 2005.

The meeting was organised by the Green Cardamom (www. greencardamom.org), a London-based arts organisation run by a Pakistani couple, Hammad Nasar and Anita Dawood who subsequently curated ‘Lines of Control’.

Launched in 2007, the show is currently on in Karachi and Dubai and will soon be taken to London.

Ali Mehdi Zaidi who runs Motiroti (www.motiroti.com), an international London-based arts organisation that he co-founded in 1996 with a Trinidad-born artist, Keith Khan, was inspired by the meeting to put together the by-now widely travelled ‘60x60’ project.

‘60x60’ features one-minute long films, 20 each from Pakistan, India and Britain, screened at public and private spaces. The films run through a gamut of human experiences and emotions, pithily exploring issues of displacement, home, and identity.

Having migrated from Pakistan to Britain, Zaidi wanted the project to include artists in Pakistan, India and Britain 'beyond what the popular media would make us believe and the lazy representation (in which) the artists’ nationality becomes the litmus through which entire nations are judged (this is a Pakistani view or an Indian view)'.

The British Council in India recently screened 60x60 in Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Chennai, Hyderabad, New Delhi and Pune. Zaidi, back in snow-bound London, told IPS via email that the project had kicked off some exciting networking and collaboration among artists, including those from the same country who didn’t know each other before.

The films, screened last year in London at Shunt Lounge by London Bridge and Vibe Gallery on Brick Lane, are currently on a loop at the ongoing international Kara Film Festival in Karachi.

Wolf, who teaches Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, London, and studies Indian documentaries, was inspired to put together the film screenings she titled ‘No Manʼs Land/Everybodyʼs Land - Glaring in Defiance’.

The films, exploring the partitions related to India, Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, Ireland and Germany, were screened in Karachi at a popular gallery-café run by the non-profit PeaceNiche (www.t2f.biz/category/peaceniche-t2f) as part of ‘Lines of Control’.

Wolf told IPS in Karachi that the starting point for her was Monica Bhasin’s ‘Temporary Loss of Consciousness’ (35 min, 2005), which creates a dialogue with the Lahore-born Urdu short story writer Saadat Hasan Manto, whom both Indians and Pakistanis claim.

'Indians are shocked to learn that Manto was Pakistani,' commented the award winning young novelist Kamila Shamsie at a discussion following the screenings. 'But what I find disturbing is not just the Indians’ reluctance to accept his ‘Pakistani-ness’, but that Pakistanis insist on asserting this ‘Pakistani-ness’, the refusal to see the blurring of identities.'

As she noted, Manto, born in British India, died in Lahore which happened to be on the Pakistan side of the borders drawn in 1947. He himself 'had the ability to see the nuances', to realise the falseness of man-made distinctions and divisions.

Bhasin impressionistically explores various partitions - Punjab, Bengal, Kashmir - using the voices from various languages. A wall crashing down as a house is manually demolished symbolises another kind of partition - the violence in Gujarat, India, 2002.

Since Hindu right-wing activists tore down the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, India has witnessed some of the worst Hindu-Muslim riots since Partition. Another turning point was the Gujarat violence of 2002 in which Hindu extremists killed some 2,000 Muslims.

'After 2004, especially after Gujarat, many of us are trying to re-look at history all over again, not from the position of heroes and villains but narratives we don’t know how to talk about,' said Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar, talking to an audience in Karachi via the Internet.

Kanwar’s ‘Lightning Testimonies’ (115 min, 2007) is an intense reflection on conflict and sexual violence. Unspoken, submerged narratives are as important as what is said. A multi-layered look at the stories of different women from various times and regions, the film explores how individuals and communities resist, remember and record violence.

'There has to be a way to find and search for the narrative of suffering,' said Kanwar, who included India’s violent military oppression in its north-eastern states to the more usual discourse on 1947 (the bloody partition of India), 1971 (the Pakistan army’s military oppression in East Pakistan, later Bangladesh), the Kashmir insurgency and Gujarat.

Partition continues to cast a shadow on India-Pakistan relations. Following the attacks of November 2008 in Mumbai for which many Indians blame Pakistan, tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours have drastically affected travel. As a result, the Indian participants could not come to Pakistan.

Wolf was in 'a bizarre situation where I’m representing their (Indians’) work' – with the exception of Kanwar in Delhi who told the Karachi audience emotionally, 'It (this participation) means a lot to me.'

Initially interested in seeing documentaries 'in relation to social activism and movements, looking at how film can be more than a representation of an issue,' Wolf wanted to focus on films with a 'productive refusal to show the usual documentary images'. As a German, she felt it was important to include a European component.

The stories of 'soldiers serving in the armies of their colonial masters,' as German filmmaker Philip Scheffner says in his ‘The Halfmoon Files’ (87 min, Germany 2007), interred at the Halfmoon Camp in Germany during the World War I, continue to haunt the present.

Scheffner’s searching, thought-provoking film uses audio recordings without images and soundless archival films of captured Indian soldiers from the British colonial army to flesh out a unique alliance between the military, the scientific community and the entertainment industry.

The London-based Otolith Group’s ‘Nervus Rerum’ (30 min, Palestine/UK 2008) takes viewers on a nightmarish tour of the Jenin Refugee Camp in Palestine, through a maze of narrow, concrete lined streets often leading to dead ends. The disturbing visuals are juxtaposed with spoken excerpts from the writings of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and French writer Jean Genet.

Wolf selected filmmakers who 'are looking for a new language to understand - perhaps the only way is not through rather traditional ‘common sense’ but through Manto’s ‘nonsensical’ approach' - a reference to Manto’s famous ‘Toba Tek Singh’ in which an inmate from a lunatic asylum ends up in no-man’s land when India is partitioned in 1947.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service