BEYOND DOCUMENTARY
A Cinematic Translation of Knowledge
I am STELLA MERIS, a Berlin/Basel based multimedia artist. My ancestors arrived in Palestine almost 150 years ago as German Templars. This is the starting point for a complex reflection about my sense of belonging. I went several times to Haifa, where my great-great-grandparents arrived in 1870 as German immigrants. Talking to citizens of Haifa and getting to know various perspectives on the past, enriched my theoretical research. The line between historical reality and fiction started to dissolve. Time becomes timeless.
"Reflexive documentary" (Nichols 1991) "moves backward and forward in time, inventing histories and memories in order to posit an alternative to the overwhelming erasures, silences, and lies of official histories" (Marks 2000: 24). Instead of offering a concrete "truth", this type of film displays a "vérité mode [which] does not confront the viewer with facts. Instead, it creates a space in which truth can be perceived as a process" and the viewer/film maker's engagement is "not only mimetic but also analytical and critical" with the subject (Balsom and Peleg 2016: 217-18). Marks refers to the term "imperfect cinema" (according to Julio García Espinosa), in order to emphasize the "partial and incomplete" form, and the "open-ended quality" of such films (Marks 2000: 10; 26). Intercultural cinema is made by filmmakers who live "between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge" and therefore "offer a variety of ways of knowing and representing the world" (Marks 2000: 1).
"Believe Me" is a video about the ambivalent feelings I experienced when growing up in a fundamentalist Christian environment. Reading about intercultural cinema led me to the conclusion that moving from a Christian religious family background to a non-religious life style shows similarities to an actual, physical migration. This raises the question "where meaningful knowledge is located." Feeling torn between completely different value systems and cultural codes makes it impossible to express the answer to this question "in the terms of one regime or the other" (Marks 2000: 24). Finding myself in between the religious and the non-religious culture is on the one hand confusing and challenging, as I lack a language that could describe this place. On the other hand, there is an interesting potential in this unknown space.
The fundamental Christian community I grew up in built their identity on the understanding of Christianity to be the only true way of living, and therefore a critical reflection about the absolute rightness of their beliefs was utterly out of question. Their Christian beliefs not only justified, but also necessitated an attitude towards "the other" that would not query the rightness of anything that served evangelical purposes. The often degrading ideas about non-Christians were propagated by religious fundamentalism. The essentialist belief that Jesus Christ is the "only way" and that only through the belief in this faith people can lead a good life, created a superimposed system of values and divided people in "good" and "bad". Non-believers were seen as "lacking something", as people who either needed to be educated or avoided. A binary opposition which decried all non-Christian cultures and people as incomplete was imposed, in order to define their own (European) Christian identity as superior and to gain power over the other (Said 2003: 8). The supremacy of an all-encompassing God who divides the world in "right" and "wrong", "heaven" and "hell" and the demand to commit to such a God always felt restrictive to me and deprived me of agency.
How can film translate and/or transvalue this experience? What is the enabling dimension of discourses that move between different cultural knowledge? Who produces what kind of knowledge for whom and what are the (political) interests behind it (Mohanty 2003: 45)? How is knowledge produced in societies, in families, in specific cultures? How can different registers of knowledge be translated and understood? As Homi Bhabha puts it, this "cultural translation" needs to dismantle the existing power-relations:
Cultural translation desacralizes the transparent assumptions of cultural supremacy, and in that very act, demands a contextual specificity, a historical differentiation within minority positions (Bhabha 1994: 228).
To deconstruct the normative thinking of the fundamental Christian culture is an ongoing process for which I need to develop a new language, as a new way of thinking is necessary. A language that translates this experience in a way that can be understood by both, religious and non-religious people, seems necessary. It is like a "dance" between religious and non-religious discourses, as they "are not only restrictive but also enabling"; offering a possibility to talk about ones experiences while also seeking to "break away" from the discourses themselves (Marks 2000: 28).
The example of queer theology opened an opportunity for me to translate and transvalue my experiences by using a language that refers to a Christian culture of knowledge but still challenges the problems inherent within that culture. A queer understanding of theology argues that essentialism is sin, and not the "disobedience with respect to God's divine commands." Therefore, any binary or normative thinking rejects the "radical love" that God embodies and therefore is considered to be sin (Siker 2012: 71-73). Dividing people in "good" and "bad", "right" and "wrong" therefore is a sin too. Connecting my resistance against fundamentalist Christianity with a critical reflection about my family history is an attempt to cross temporal and spatial categories. I ask how these strata, time and space, can be brought together through a cinematic language that uses a documental characteristic.
Archives, testimonials, family photos and home videos, TV-news, new recordings and other sources build the material that I work with. Being privileged as a citizen of Germany and Switzerland, I have access to archives that are located in Israel and Germany. It is a "paradoxical ability" that I have access to this images while they are unavailable to the many Palestinians who lost their homes (Marks 2000: 56). I look through the moving images and sounds not to find "historical truth", but "in the full knowledge that these stories are willful constructions of irretrievable histories (Hall 1988a in: (Marks 2000: 4))." Rather I try to offer an alternative perspective on history, a
projective past (...) as a historical narrative of alterity that explores forms of social antagonism and contradiction that are not yet properly represented, political identities in the process of being formed, cultural enunciations in the act of hybridity, in the process of translating and transvaluing cultural differences (Bhabha 1994: 252).
How can I challenge the religious essentialism of my ancestors by examining and rewriting my family history? Is it possible to I include the perspective of the "other", non-Christian, without repeating the binary division between "us" and "them"? Where is this historical reflection related to my own experience of moving between cultures? Can film go beyond documentary and show, to phrase Rushdie, "how newness enters the world" (Bhabha 1994: 227)?
The 'newness' of migrant or minority discourse has to be discovered in medias res: a newness that is not part of the 'progressivist' division between past and present, or the archaic and the modern; nor is it a 'newness' that can be contained in the mimesis of 'original and copy' (Bhabha 1994: 227).
Understanding hybridity in Bhabha's sense as something "empowering" enables me as a filmmaker to speak about the ambiguities and contrariness that are inherent to the experience of a "migration" from one value system to another (from a religious space to a non-religious space). For me it never seems clear where exactly I belong to, as I feel displaced in both of these different worlds. It is a transmitting work necessary to make this space in between visible and understandable. As Derrida explains, the question of "origin" dissolves in doing so:
In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable. There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer a simple origin. For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, of the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three (Derrida and Spivak 1997: 36).
It is this new "third space" that evolves through the creative act of translation (Bhabha 1994: 36). I ask if and how I could re-connect to Christian values and spirituality without registers of "right" and "wrong." Therefore, I need to deconstruct the Christian myth of there being just one right way to believe and create something new.
According to Popper, science begins with the "capacity of criticism" of myth, meaning not to continue thinking in binary oppositions (Segal 2007: 9). Puhvel states that myths create a "self-image and worldview on an individual and a collective level" and "potent tensions of language and history". He reminds that the "datum itself is more important than any theory that may be applied to it" (Puhvel 2007: 102). Therefore, the historical context must be considered when talking about myth. As Segal puts it, "a blatantly false conviction might seem to have a stronger hold than a true one, for the conviction remains firm even in the face of its transparent falsity" (Segal 2007: 5). Barthes assumes that myth has a rather social function than an intellectual one. In his perspective, a culture creates myths "to make itself seem more natural" (Segal 2007: 17). As Bultmann puts it, myth has to be demystified in order to understand the "true, symbolic meaning" of it. It means to deliberate myth from its claim to be "about the world" and finally find out, that it is more about the "human experience of the world". Rather than being an "explanation", myth is revealed to be an "expression" of the "human condition" (Segal 2007: 11). Myth itself cannot be considered as a historical truth, but still it does show how people who believe in the myth perceive reality. Segal accordingly suggests that "myth must be studied as literature rather than as history, sociology, or something else non-literary" (Segal 2007: 2). For him myth is a "self-serving" story, belief or ideology that needs to be understood symbolically (Segal 2007: 4). In order to see other perspectives and to also value them as “true”, one must give up the belief that one’s narrative or myth is “the right one”. Because this causes “questioning of one’s own narrative and therefore of one’s self-perception” this is an emotional challenge (Kibble 2012: 560-561). As Kibble says, a “spiritual conversion” is needed to get through this process (Kibble 2012: 564).
I aim to find a poetic ductus that encompasses the ambivalence and contrariness of living within different realities. Binarities shall dissolve and normative boundaries shall be crossed. By editing the documental material that I collect throughout my research, it becomes the carrier of new meanings. Only through the eyes of the viewer this new meaning can become reality.
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