Normal View Dyslexic View
Research Article
(Extra)ordinary images: photography, memory and creative documentary – Rwanda and Argentina
Piotr Cieplak*†
p.cieplak@sussex.ac.uk
Abstract
This essay is a reflection on two creative documentary films produced as outputs of projects supported by the British Academy: The Faces We Lost (2017) and (Dis)Appear (2023). Both films focus on the commemorative and memorial functions of domestic and ID photographs – The Faces We Lost in relation to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and (Dis)Appear in relation to the civic-military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983). The essay outlines the importance of domestic and ID photographs in each context and discusses some of the conceptual, formal and creative decisions behind the two documentaries. But it also attempts to contribute to the conversation about creative documentary filmmaking, and creative practice research more generally, as a form of academic enquiry. Lastly, it asks questions about the opportunities and limitations of making films within the academic rather than commercial environment, especially films made in and about the Global South.
Keywords
creative documentaryRwandaArgentinaphotographymemorycreative practice researchgenocidedictatorshipIntroduction
In this essay, I reflect on the production of two feature-length creative documentary films I directed and produced as outputs of projects supported by the British Academy: The Faces We Lost (2017) and (Dis)Appear (2023).1 Both films are about the commemorative and memorial functions of domestic and ID photographs – The Faces We Lost in relation to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and (Dis)Appear in relation to the civic-military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983). One of the main questions I am interested in exploring here is about the particular challenges and opportunities of creative documentary filmmaking as a form of academic enquiry, and its dual status as a primary and secondary text; as an artefact and a critique.2 I access this topic through a discussion of the formal and creative decisions in The Faces We Lost and the conceptual development of (Dis)Appear.3
Figure 1.
Poster for The Faces We Lost (2017).
Figure 2.
Poster for (Dis)Appear (2023).
Elizabeth Edwards asks: ‘what do people want photographs to be – for them’ (2021: 281)? In a way, this was also the central question behind both The Faces We Lost and (Dis)Appear. One of the initial assumptions for both projects was that the relative ubiquity and familiarity of domestic and ID photographs in different cultural and geographical contexts can act as form of a leveller, while allowing for the importance of particular circumstances to emerge around the images and the ways people use them. At some level, a wedding photograph is always recognisably a wedding photograph, a passport portrait, a passport portrait. There is, of course, a difference between family snaps and photography appearing on documentation. For instance, in the Argentine case, the first category references ‘the family ties that linked victims to those who demanded their reappearance’, as well as ‘a domestic order, before it was shattered by the violence of the state’ (Longoni 2010: 7). This ability to transcend contexts, powerful in itself, results in something particularly poignant when considered alongside instances of violence and trauma that have become historically significant. Referring to the ‘Tower of Sephardic Faces’ in the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, Marianne Hirsch proposes that: ‘[t]he conventional nature of family photography makes the space for […] identification.’ It allows the visitor to ‘leave the historical account of the museum and enter a domestic space of a family album that shapes a different form of looking and knowing, a different style of recognition’ (1997: 252–255).
On the face of it, ID photography is often seen to do the opposite in that it can ‘blur [the subject’s] personal ties and [place] him or her in an impersonal register’ (Longoni 2010: 7). It is, after all, a categorising tool employed by the state. But, as Ana Longoni points out, ‘[t]he fact that the relatives [in Argentina] used those photographs as evidence served to reveal and dramatise the paradoxical overlap between the state’s control machinery and the state’s machinery for the extermination and disappearance of its subjects, between identification and destruction, control and denial’ (Longoni 2010: 7).
Focusing on domestic and ID photography within the creative documentary genre in this context, as I have done in The Faces We Lost and (Dis)Appear, offers two main opportunities. Firstly, it allows for a consideration of how meaning emerges around the images – as opposed to photographs made by professional photographers and journalists, which, more often than not, are designed and produced for the very purpose of documenting an event, documenting history. Secondly, it allows for a bridge to be created between objectively terrible experiences and the domesticity, the familiarity of the family photograph. This close co-presence, enacted in the present tense of film form, creates an opportunity for exploration – and potential understanding – without othering.
Rwanda and The Faces We Lost
The 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda claimed one million victims in just one hundred days. The group targeted for total elimination were the Rwandan Tutsis, but moderate Hutus and members of the Twa minority were also sought out and killed. It’s important to note that the genocide was not a spontaneous eruption of decontextualised violence, even though that was how it was mostly reported. It had been planned and preceded by acts of mass violence (largely unpunished) against Tutsis reaching as far back as the 1950s. Once underway, the genocide became a ‘mass killing on a scale that had not been seen since the Nazi Holocaust’ (Holmes 2014: 12). How the ensuing violence was carried out is also significant:
While the officials, the Presidential Guard, the army and the militias helped to organize, coordinate and carry out the slaughters, the fact remains that many ordinary Rwandans also took part in them. Neighbours killed neighbours; instances of family members slaying their kin were also reported. These intimate betrayals testify to the degree of integration between the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority, who spoke the same language, shared the same culture, intermarried and, in opposition to how they were represented in the international media at the time, were not separate ‘tribes’ (Cieplak 2017: 10).
The 1994 genocide against the Tutsi has been described as a ‘genocide without images’ (Roskis 2007: 238). The designation can be read as both figurative and literal. It is figurative in the sense that there were relatively few photographers/camerapeople on the ground when the genocide was happening and in how it was and wasn’t covered editorially in the international media.4 It is literal because of the lack of images of actual killings. To my knowledge, only one piece of footage showing people being slaughtered by machetes at a roadblock exists.5 The majority of the photographic and audio-visual output produced at the time consists of ‘metonymic’ images: human remains, the spaces where massacres took place, tools used in the killing (Saxton 2008: 14). Another set of images emerged during the ensuing refugee crisis in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Tanzania, an event often visually conflated with the genocide (Cieplak 2017). These photographs tended to focus on the conditions of life and death in refugee camps, and often adhered to the usual stereotypes that plague the visual representation of African, non-white, suffering: anonymity, a focus on children, terrible living conditions, mutilated corpses, to mention just a few. As time went by, the photographs were joined by widely-distributed blockbuster films such as Hotel Rwanda (2004).6 So in a way, just as it could be described as a ‘genocide without images,’ the 1994 slaughter of Rwandan Tutsis has also been a genocide mediated entirely through images, especially to international spectators.
Having spent almost a decade researching the lens-based output related to the genocide and its aftermath, I was aware that many Rwandans commemorated their dead with different kinds of images.7 Photographs often showing life rather than death: a passport or an ID card photo, or a group portrait from a wedding (e.g. Clip 2). In The Faces We Lost, I aspired to shed light on this complex form of commemoration and to work against the representational trend of Rwandans being shown mostly as subjects – often helpless and without agency – rather than as active consumers and users of images. Secondly, I wanted the film to challenge the idea that there can only exist one kind of ‘genocide image’; that only a particular kind of image – usually journalistic, taken with a seemingly objective eye – can act as proof that the genocide happened. Susan Sontag writes that ‘the very notion of atrocity,’ especially that ‘experienced’ from afar, is often ‘associated with the expectation of photographic evidence’ (Sontag 2003: 74). I believe that this view still holds, especially in the Global North. But the expectation of what a ‘genocide image’ should be, what it should look like, who should take it and what exactly it should show, is perspectival. It depends on who demands it. Most Rwandans do not need to be told or shown that the genocide happened. Many have lived through it; most have lost family members or had family members participate in it. Consequently, the expectations projected onto the few surviving family or institutional photographs are different to those projected onto the work of photojournalists.8 They are also, I would argue, evidential but not in the purely indexical sense.
Clip 2.
Excerpt from The Faces We Lost – Mama Lambert talks about the photographs of the family members and friends she lost in the genocide. https://vimeo.com/922399630
When conceiving the film, I was wary of not replacing one kind of homogenisation with another. Just because people are using the same kinds of images, it does not mean that they are using them in the same way. This translated into the two main creative, formal decisions at the heart of The Faces We Lost: the selection of participants and the narrative structure of the film. At an institutional level, the vast majority of the collection, archiving, digitisation and display of private images of genocide victims is done at the Genocide Archive of Rwanda and the Kigali Genocide Memorial. The initiative of collecting family photographs emerged in 2006, with the expressed aim of individualising the victims and showing that ‘they were not just a number’ (Kamuronsi 2009). As can be seen in Clips 3 and 4, the Kigali Genocide Memorial has a room dedicated to the photographs and a temperature-controlled archive where the donated originals (and some copies) are held.
Clip 3.
Excerpt from The Faces We Lost – handling and preservation of the photos of genocide victims at the Genocide Archive of Rwanda. https://vimeo.com/922403460
Clip 4.
Excerpt from The Faces We Lost – photos of the victims of the genocide at the Kigali Genocide Memorial. https://vimeo.com/922405837
During my research I found that the public-facing, collective nature of these efforts stands alongside – and sometimes in contrast to – the way many of these images function in Rwandan homes, where their existence is often marked by a high level of intimacy, frequent interaction, and a focus on their material existence. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (2004: 6–7) point to the indexical bias in how photographs are often spoken and written about. And yet it is frequently the case that photography’s ‘material and presentational forms’ are ‘central to the function of the photograph as a socially salient object’ (3). Unlike in the temperature-controlled archive (where they are stored in numbered, sealed boxes), the computer screen or even the memorial museum exhibition, the photographs in the home are scaffolded with the living memories of their keepers, who often lead lives very distant to the official, professionalised memory discourse.
Clip 5.
Excerpt from The Faces We Lost – Cecile Mutabonwa talks about the photographs of people she lost during the genocide and what they mean to her. https://vimeo.com/922407580
The participants portrayed in The Faces We Lost can be divided into two groups: those working with photographs in a professional capacity (while also sharing their personal stories of genocide and photography related loss) – Aline Umugwaneza, Claver Irakoze, Serge Rwigamba and Paul Rukesha – and those who share their experiences from a completely personal perspective and have no particular connection with the world of archives and memorial museums: Mama Lambert, Adeline Umuhoza, Oliva Mukarusine, Claudine Mukantaganzwa, Rebecca Muragijimana, Rachel Uwiringiyimana and Cecile Mutabonwa. In a corresponding desire to present different facets of the phenomenon, the film strives for geographical and generational diversity. Life and practices in the capital Kigali can be very different to those in rural Rwanda. The idea was to create a visual conversation between – and to suggest the co-existence of – these different worlds and experiences: of the professional and private memory work; of the younger generations using their phones to interact with photos and the older generations being attached to their physical, material form; of people who have many photographs and people who have none. Creative documentary, especially that rooted in academic research and used as a mode of enquiry rather than a solely representational tool, is well placed to do this because it offers the opportunity to both show and synthetise, and because of its status as, simultaneously, a creative artefact and a form of critique and analysis (I turn to this in more detail below). This allows for the acknowledgement of the co-presence of experiences and practices, often subtle, without the necessity of imposing an explicit narrative on their meaning.
An example of a visual conversation of this kind can be seen in Clips 3 and 5. In the former, we see the photographs handled in the sterile conditions of the archive. There is an evident care and affection in this handling, but also the professionalism of a gloved stranger. The onus is on preservation, on cleaning and getting rid of imperfections that may endanger the longevity of the images. In Clip 5, on the other hand, Cecile Mutabonwa’s photographs are scattered on the table. Some are in albums, others loose. Some have already begun to lose their colour and definition, others are barely photographs at all. Destroyed by the damp and exposure to the elements, they’re just squares of colourful patterns. To a stranger, they don’t show anything in particular. Cecile also handles them, but differently. It’s a different kind of care, geared towards recollection rather than preservation. The idea was to place these simultaneous worlds in a quiet conversation with each other, not compared exactly but subtly co-existing within the narrative of the film. There is, of course, a hope that the viewer will make something of this co-existence but that’s not its sole purpose. To me, one of the big advantages of using film as a form of enquiry is precisely the ability to suggest rather than say, to show rather than tell. Because, in a way, showing can be less definitive than telling and this, perhaps counter-intuitively, can be generative when it comes to positioning the recipient of knowledge as an active agent rather than a passive receiver.
Clip 6.
Excerpt from The Faces We Lost – Adeline Umuhoza talks about the photo of her father. https://vimeo.com/922408685
Clip 7.
Excerpt from The Faces We Lost – Paul Rukesha talks about a “constructed” photos of his parents. https://vimeo.com/922410695
Clip 8.
Excerpt from The Faces We Lost – Claudine Mukantaganzwa talks about not having any images of her husband, and what it means for her two daughters. https://vimeo.com/922412159
The exploration of these diverse relationships with photography (as shown in Clips 6, 7 and 8) is directly connected to the second major formal decision taken at the planning stage: the narrative structure. What I mean here in particular is the fact that The Faces We Lost has many participants for a film of its length, just over an hour. From a purely filmic perspective, this could be seen as a poor decision. Focusing on fewer stories would most likely result in a greater degree of identification with the individuals depicted and the ability to delve deeper into their experiences. I would imagine that if the film was produced in the commercial, industry milieu, rather than an academic one, this kind of consideration would be likely to triumph over others. Unlike in Argentina, where the topic of the photos of the disappeared and their pivotal role in the fight for justice and memory is very well worked through, in Rwanda there existed very little when it came to scholarly or audio-visual production on the subject.9 Considering this representational context, showing a greater number of the facets of this under-explored topic dictated the survey-like, multivocal approach to the structure of the film. Again, creative documentary offers a rich opportunity here to re-think the foundational concepts that still dominate much audio-visual production, such as the ‘protagonist(s)’ or even the ‘story’.10
While much could be said about the potential impact of documentary on those portrayed or affected, I want to focus here on the issue of anonymity, which often comes up in filmmaking because of the medium’s primary aspiration: to show. The challenge, of course, is not limited to creative visual practice research and applies to multiple disciplines. Writing about ethnographic work, Michael Herzfeld acknowledges the need for ‘some means of perpetually reminding ourselves that our actions affect our interlocutors’ (2023: 3). Moreover, we have to make a distinction between an anonymised – or even named – citation of an interview in an academic article or a monograph and having one’s face, voice and name shown on screen, often in one’s own home or workplace. The complexity is compounded even further when people are asked to speak about personal and potentially traumatic experiences (rather than giving a professional opinion) and, I would argue, when the research takes place in the Global South, but with the researcher based in the Global North, as is the case in my practice. This even before we consider the presence of the camera and, often, the production crew.11
The question of anonymity often comes up in the context of seeking ethical approval for research (including film) within the University (Gordon 2019; Herzfeld 2023) and can result in a tension between institutional processes, often driven by the fear of litigation, (Herzfeld 2023) and the demands of the fieldwork, especially when it comes to entering into a meaningful contract of trust with one’s participants. While it comes with risks, sharing people’s experiences in such a direct connection with their names, faces, voices and environments, as one does in a documentary, can also be seen as a move towards making visible and individualising what is often invisibilised and collectivised (Gordon 2019). Visual accounts of suffering in the Global South, and especially in Africa, are so often mired by anonymity and interchangeability, which contributes to the perception that ‘this is the sort of thing which happens in that place’ and nourishes the belief ‘in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward – that is, poor – parts of the world’ (Sontag 2003: 64). The opportunity offered by creative documentary filmmaking of attaching an experience to an individual is fraught with potential pitfalls (and can limit what they are prepared to say), but it can also be a meaningful, sustained and respectful way of countering the problematic manner in which knowledge about the Global South, or indeed marginalised groups anywhere in the world, has been traditionally produced, disseminated and owned. As Herzfeld points out, ‘agency is never complete on either side […] its recognition requires creative balancing over time’ (2023: 6).
Working with film in an academic context – which often means much lower budgets than when doing so within the industry but, on the other hand, can result in extended production and research times – also opens up the possibility of formal experimentation; of an attempt at a meaningful conversation between form and content. To me, a creative documentary proposed as a piece of academic research needs to answer two central, overlapping questions. One: why should this be a film? Two: what makes the medium more appropriate to investigate this topic than a book or a research article? The answers should go beyond the issue of accessibility (although this is also important). If it is to be applied as a research method, filmmaking should play a role that goes beyond just representation. While The Faces We Lost is about photographs and the relationships people have with them, I wanted these rare, precious objects to play a more active part in the film than just being shown. The idea was to use them in interviews in order to depart from purely testimonial practice.
Recording structured testimony is relatively widely used in Rwanda. Beyond the general aspiration to the preservation of memory, the declared purpose of this collection is making genocide denial impossible, especially when confronted with first-person survivors’ accounts. This frequently results in fact-oriented questioning and re-questioning, based on the recounting of horrible, traumatic experiences. The interviewing approach in The Faces We Lost was purposefully different. I chose to focus on memories that emanated from actual images; to use the photographs as a starting point in the conversation about the past. The terrible experience of the genocide usually formed part of the recollection but was not necessarily the central memory, as it tends to be in some testimonies. I hoped that this would give the interviewees a greater sense of control over what to say and what not to say; not increased agency exactly, but an option to omit or to re-direct. These omissions and re-directions, in turn, would be visible to the viewer on screen. They join other, often small, gestures whose power comes from the fact that they are observed, picked up on rather than pointed out. A glimpse of this can be seen in Clip 6, in the moment in which Adeline Umuhoza, having just told us that after seeing her father’s photos she had decided to emulate him, adopts a pose that so closely resembles that which her dad had chosen for his portrait.
Making a film in an academic rather than an industry context also means that the production workflows can be adjusted to accommodate pro-filmic considerations and work against established representational patterns. For instance, in The Faces We Lost, I was able to introduce several formal red lines. It was clear to me from the very beginning that the film should not include a voiceover or expert interviews. Many documentaries on Rwanda use the voices and experiences of survivors as illustrations of hypotheses or wider frameworks proposed by academics, historians or politicians. I was determined to put the survivors and relatives of genocide victims at the centre of the film – without an additional explanatory framework.12 While I cannot argue with full certainty that such formal decisions would be impossible in the commercial world – and The Faces We Lost did go on to be screened on American Public TV and at numerous international film festivals – I would suggest that the considered (and usually much slower) academic filmmaking allows for a greater flexibility when it comes to the connection between content and form.
At the same time, film, and especially documentary film, in academia occupies an undeniably peculiar place. And I do not mean here its usefulness, legitimacy or use as a method or tool of enquiry. What I mean is its status somewhere between a primary and secondary text. It uses pre-existing knowledge to produce and critique knowledge but it also itself becomes subject to interpretation – in a way, a primary source. I would argue that it is partly this conflation of functions that can make it an effective tool for engaging wider audiences with the findings of research. Again, positionality here is everything. While wide distribution and reaching international audiences was important, so was the kind of afterlife The Faces We Lost would have in Rwanda. This was particularly crucial because it is often the case that externally funded and produced films shot in Africa do not get to circulate in their place of origin (Shohat & Stam 1994). In addition to screenings at the Rwanda Film Festival and at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, in collaboration with the therapist Emelienne Mukansoro, we organised screenings of the film to groups of survivors around rural Rwanda and reached around four hundred people, followed by lively and sometimes tearful discussions.13 Beyond disseminating the findings of the project, it was also a way of giving the film’s participants a sense of ownership over the finished product, with many attending the screenings in order to answer questions from the audience – about their experiences but also about what it was like to participate in the production of the film.14
These discussions, in way, exceeded the content of the film and continued the process of research. For instance, one thing that emerged in these post-screening encounters was the fact that many people see the photographs of their relatives lost during the genocide in the same category as other physical objects that either belonged or had a physical connection to the victims, e.g. a dress someone used to wear. Another aspect of the practice that came up quite often was the fact that the presence of the photographs is not a ubiquitously positive presence. Numerous audience members shared accounts of destroying images in the aftermath of the genocide, as vivid and painful reminders of the lives and people that had been lost. Neither of these widely shared experiences were present in the film. They only came up during the screenings. I reference these two points to illustrate the already-mentioned unique status of a film as a research output. Specifically, as something finished and complete – showing particular stories, people and circumstances – but also as something that’s less definitive than an academic article in that it can also be used as a tool of elicitation; a defined but not necessarily final point in a conversation or a process. Conceived in this way, it becomes more akin to a play or a script. The text, themes and structure are there on the page, but once the director and the actors engage with it, it becomes something else. Similarly, the viewer will also do something with the film, and this can become a creative process in its own right.
Argentina and (Dis)Appear
I would now like to turn to the process of conceptual development and its importance in how creative documentary can be framed as a tool of academic enquiry and a methodology. I explore this in relation to the attempt to problematise and test the concepts of appearance, disappearance and an ‘impossible photograph’ in (Dis)Appear.
The most recent civic-military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983) killed and/or disappeared thirty thousand people. The tactics employed by the military junta and its agents included the kidnapping and illegal detention of those perceived as political enemies of the state, systematic torture, the appropriation of children, and throwing drugged but conscious prisoners from military planes into the Atlantic or La Plata River during ‘Death Flights’. The dictatorial state developed a network of five hundred clandestine detention, torture and extermination centres around the country (CDCs). Most of the victims of the repression remain missing; the precise details of what happened to them, including the location of their bodies, are still unknown. Forced disappearances created a well-documented ontological nightmare for the relatives of the victims, and also for some of the victims themselves. They disrupted usual mourning practices; reduced the possibility of emotional closure; complicated justice processes; perverted the link between the individual and the state; and introduced unique challenges to representational efforts. Forced disappearances were also the drivers behind the initial acts of resistance to the military regime. One of the main tools of this resistance was repurposed domestic and institutional photography. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, marching with the photographs of their disappeared children, themselves eventually became the iconic image associated with the dictatorship and its legacy (Gamarnik 2024).
While never relinquishing their indexical connection to the people they show, these photographs also eventually gained the status of signs, offering a visual shortcut for forced disappearance itself (Longoni 2010). ‘The photos of the disappeared’ continue to be ‘one of the most commonly used ways to remember them’ (da Silva Catela 2001: 137). In the forty years since the return of democracy, Argentina has developed one of the most vibrant and diverse political memory ecosystems and human rights movements in the world, which is now part of the contemporary political discourse (Jelin 2021: 44). The photos of the disappeared remain a central tenet of this landscape. Their role is likely to evolve further in the coming years, following the election of the right-wing libertarian Javier Milei to the presidency. Milei’s vice-president, Victoria Villaruel, is known for her long-held negationist views when it comes to the Argentine dictatorship, the number of its victims and the culpability of the perpetrators (Montoya & Genoux 2023).
Unlike in Rwanda when I was making The Faces We Lost, the topic of what domestic, repurposed photography can do in the aftermath of mass violence had been thoroughly worked through in Argentina.15 The presence of this wider representational context became one of the key aspects of the development process for (Dis)Appear and, in a way, dictated the focus on less talked-about domestic images associated with the dictatorship and its legacy, and the seeking out of more unusual, innovative ways of employing the photographs in political and memory activism. It also meant that the likely focus would be on a smaller number of participants as there was less need than there had been in Rwanda to fill in the representational gap when it came to showing the diversity of the uses of the images. Together with the film’s co-writer, the Argentine anthropologist Mariana Tello Weiss, we decided to start with the relationship between survivors and photographs, and specifically the story of a family portrait of Ana Iliovich, a writer and survivor of La Perla CDC, which in many ways resembled a concentration camp.16 The situation of Argentine survivors is particularly complicated when compared to other post-conflict contexts. The stigma that frequently accompanies survival has been well documented, as have been the dangers often encountered by those who decide to testify in the courts (Longoni 2007; Tello Weiss 2024). But even within this already complex landscape, Ana’s story is unusual. Having been chosen by her captors and torturers to survive, Ana, after over a year of being kept in La Perla, was allowed to temporarily leave the CDC for short periods and visit her family in the small city of Bell Ville.17 After a weekend spent at home, she would catch a bus back to La Perla and continue her incarceration, a period referred to as ‘monitored freedom’ (Tello Weiss 2024). This suspension between remaining disappeared and re-appearing continued for months. Ana talks about the maddening nature of this experience in Clip 10, which includes passages from her book: El Silencio: Postales de la Perla [The Silence: Postcards from La Perla] (Iliovich 2017).
Clip 10.
Excerpt from (Dis)Appear – Ana Iliovich talks about her experience of ‘monitored freedom’ and the photo taken upon her release from La Perla. https://vimeo.com/922502276
As can be seen in the clip, the family photograph which Ana’s mother organised to be taken upon seeing her daughter for the first time after over a year of disappearance, came to signify the paradox of being and remaining disappeared, while, technically, re-appearing in the family milieu (Tello Weiss 2024). In the film, Ana says: ‘For me this implies that La Perla was there with me […] that Argentina was one vast concentration camp.’ The idea that something as seemingly innocuous as a family photograph could signify the spreading of the concentrationary experience beyond the camp’s physical boundaries is further explored in the conversation between Ana and her brother, Lisandro Iliovich, who was just a child at the time of Ana’s disappearance and re-appearance, and whose parents, wanting to protect him from the reality of Ana’s situation, told him that she had gone to Brazil. While it was important to show what this difficult photo, which, to an unknowing eye looks like any Argentine family portrait from the 1970s, meant to Ana, it was also imperative to show what it meant to her brother. And, in this, to create a screen space that can, supportively and gently, contest the memories one builds around images; expose their subjective and perspectival nature. In Clip 11, Ana and Lisandro talk about Lisandro’s smile in the photograph.
Clip 11.
Excerpt from (Dis)Appear – fragment of a conversation between Ana and Lisandro Iliovich about the family photo taken upon Ana’s release from La Perla. https://vimeo.com/922503906
The other main storyline in (Dis)Appear is also connected to the complexity of appearing, and the relationship of this complexity to the photographic register. It centres on the work of the Cordoban artist, Gabriel Orge, and, specifically, his long-term project Apareciendo [Appearing]. In this project, Gabriel stages urban and rural interventions which consist of projecting images of people killed and/or disappeared in public spaces. The photos typically pertain to the family album or identification documents. The projections usually start at dusk, with the image barely visible and battling with the remnants of sunlight, and continue into the night, when the projected photographs gain their full clarity and strength and the disappeared person ‘appears’. As Gabriel states in the film: ‘As it begins to get darker, the image becomes brighter. There’s an analogy with what happens when you develop photographic film.’ During my research, I learned that Gabriel and Ana had been born and grew up in the same town, Bell Ville. In addition to this geographical, biographical link, the two stories cast different light on the complexity of disappearance and re-appearance, and what it might mean in the context of political violence. In (Dis)Appear, Gabriel investigates the story of another disappeared woman from Bell Ville, Marta Pilar Luque (Clip 12). She was killed on 4 November 1976. The investigation culminates in a projection in Parque Tau in Bell Ville.
Clip 12.
Excerpts for (Dis)Appear – Gabriel Orge working with the image of Marta Pilar Luque, assassinated by the Argentine dictatorship. https://vimeo.com/922505205
Just like Ana’s family portrait, the photo of Marta that Gabriel is working with has a date printed on its wide border (Figures 3 and 4). It was something that used to happen in photographic laboratories at the time, the printing of the date on which the film was developed and the photograph produced. But this seemingly insignificant detail becomes powerfully poignant in both images: in Ana’s because she appears in the photo on the date when she was technically still disappeared; in Marta’s because the date on the photo is around three months after she was killed. And so, (Dis)Appear became a film about two ‘impossible’ photographs, and this ‘impossibility’ the subject of the formal enquiry undertaken in the documentary. Of course, the viewer is very quickly able to deduce that it’s not the images that are impossible. Rather, they are made to appear ‘impossible’ by the fuzzy ontology caused by forced disappearance, and its unique relationship to photography.
Figure 3.
Still from (Dis)Appear showing Ana Iliovich’s family photo.
Figure 4.
Still from (Dis)Appear showing the portrait of Marta Pilar Luque used for the projection prepared by the artist Gabriel Orge.
The conceptual thread that runs through (Dis)Appear thus centres on the idea of what it means to disappear, appear, and, sometimes, re-appear – and how domestic photography taken and used under such extreme circumstances can destabilise these seemingly straightforward terms. However, it is a two-way conversation, in which the situation also talks back, so to speak, to the medium, in that it challenges some of the accepted characteristics of photography, such as the indexically framed evidential guarantee of the co-presence of the referent and the camera. To be more precise, it doesn’t challenge the fact of this occurrence but it does challenge what exactly it can tell us, what it can prove.
As is often the case with creative documentary, the actual making of the film resulted in the production of other kinds of knowledge, too. For instance, what emerged was a portrait of the experience of the dictatorship and its enduring legacy in a small, provincial city such as Bell Ville. This is particularly important as, while state violence of the 1970s and 1980s swept the entire country and was systemic, it is also true that different parts of Argentina experienced the period in particular ways and at particular times. Yet, as others have noted, a lot of the memory discourse, especially that visible internationally, is very Buenos Aires-centric (Jelin 2021; Tello Weiss 2024). This, in a way, brings us back to the formal possibilities that come with using creative documentary filmmaking as a mode of inquiry – the ability to capture what is often unsaid. As can be seen in Clip 11, I decided to record the conversation between Ana and Lisandro about what the photograph meant to each of them, rather than opting for the more traditional interview. They were both surprised at the fact that, in front of the camera, with the presence of, albeit minimal, film crew, they said things to each other they had never said before. It would be unwise to generalise about what the presence of the camera does and what it doesn’t do, beyond that it always alters a situation. As Stella Bruzzi rightly asks: ‘what else is a documentary but a dialogue between a filmmaker, a crew and a situation that, although in existence prior to their arrival, has irrevocably been changed by that arrival?’ (Bruzzi 2000: 164). Under the right circumstances, the presence of the camera can provoke and capture a conversation that would otherwise be either impossible or unlikely to take place. But, crucially, it can also capture a gesture or a look that speaks more than the answers to ten interview questions, and one that would be difficult to transmit through description alone. In other words, it can introduce an ambiguity, defined not by vagueness but by complexity that eschews simple explanations.
It goes without saying that the presence of the camera is neither always productive, nor always positive. The camera can also intimidate. It can push participants into saying things they might assume they are expected to say.18 As has been expertly illustrated by the recent film Subject (Tiexiera & Hall 2022), the documentary encounter is never free of the presence of a power dynamic of one kind or another, with most of this power often resting in the hands of the filmmaker (Nichols 2016). Arguably, this is also the case in more traditional academic research interviews, unrecorded or just audio-recorded. While this might be so, I would argue that the fact that one form is aimed primarily at a researcher (to interpret, analyse and write up) and the other, while also subject to analysis, is intended for editing and direct presentation to a wider audience, changes the power dynamic considerably. There is a heightened sense of immediacy and consequences in the latter encounter.
Creative documentary as a research method faces many challenges. With documentary film’s claims to objectivity and truth, now largely debunked but still persisting in how the medium is perceived and, sometimes, presented, it is important to remember and whenever possible acknowledge that filmmaking is an artifice, a language like any other, with selection bias, structures, conventions and an array of rhetorical devices. Concerns about verisimilitude and truth are often better served with questions about what the work is trying to say. Because there is always an undisputable tension between the material and its presentation. The story must be told with its nuances and as truthfully as possible – the very requirement for the presence of a story is of consequence, too – but also in a way that will ensure that people will watch it. This can be and should be a tricky balance. It should result in sleepless nights of thinking about what viewers will take away from a film as the result of editing decisions, as the result of choosing what to show and what not to show. There isn’t a silver bullet here. The impact and consequences of these decisions, and of this mode of working more generally, need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Doing such work within academia, away from the commercial pressures of the industry, definitely helps, as does long-term research that equips the filmmaker with the ability to evaluate these decisions. And while some of these challenges are specific to creative documentary filmmaking as a method, I do wonder if they are so different to some of the questions we ask ourselves, or should ask ourselves, in any other form of presentation of predominantly qualitative research.
To conclude, I’d like to return to the ability of audio-visual research outputs to reach wider, non-academic audiences. I don’t mean here the metrics-based ways of measuring impact and public engagement. Rather, I mean the opportunity for intimate but powerful moments of reflection that can sometimes occur. During a screening of (Dis)Appear, a young member of the audience commented that while the stories and ideas in the film touched and informed them, what they found particularly striking was the fact that they saw the local park and the avenue that runs through it on screen, alongside what the protagonists of the film experienced during the dictatorship. For this spectator, these secondary shots, B-roll at best, facilitated the connection between the past and the present. They drove home the fact that the past is not, in fact, a foreign country. That when it comes to human rights and how they can be violated and taken away by the state, there exists a concrete connection, a continuity even, between now and then. The ability to encourage this kind of synthesis seems crucial, especially as Argentina enters another period of political turmoil, with many battles for human rights, memory and justice that appeared to have been won, likely to have to be fought again. Just like Ana Iliovich says in the film, there is an imperative in making such work, especially for those who did not experience this period and kind of violence directly, so that ‘they understand that it’s not just something that happened ages ago, but something that is still present, still exists, insists and still hurts.’
Acknowledgements
This essay is the result of research conducted during two projects funded by the British Academy: ‘Personal archives of trauma and violence: image and memory in the digital age – Argentina and Rwanda’ (SG152042), and ‘Intimate moments, public acts: photographs of the disappeared and memory politics in Argentina’ (SRG20∖200164). I am thankful to the Academy for supporting this work.
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Filmography
(Dis)Appear (Piotr Cieplak, 2023, UK).
Hotel Rwanda (Terry George, 2004, UK/USA/Italy/South Africa).
The Faces We Lost (Piotr Cieplak, 2017, UK).
Roger: Genocide Baby (Nick Andrews, 2011, UK).
Subject (Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall, 2022, USA)
1
The Faces We Lost (60 mins) was made as part of ‘Personal archives of trauma and violence: image and memory in the digital age – Argentina and Rwanda’ (SG152042). (Dis)Appear (64 mins) was made as part of ‘Intimate moments, public acts: photographs of the disappeared and memory politics in Argentina’ (SRG20∖200164).
2
The term creative documentary can be quite slippery and, often, too encompassing. John Grierson famously described the documentary form in general as the ‘creative treatment of actuality’ (Hardy 1979: 11). More recently, in Creative Documentary: Theory and Practice (2013), Wilma de Jong, Erik Knudsen and Jerry Rothwell, both narrowed and expanded the term to ‘single films rather than formats or television series, and […] films that start from an existing situation rather than a situation specifically constructed for the production’ (5). They also emphasize the creative documentary’s objective to take the audience ‘to an existing or past reality’ in a way that allows them to ‘empathise with mind, emotions and imagination’ (23). I would add to this the distinction from a news report or an interview-based televisual documentary, in that creative documentary, while it presents the reality of its participants or topic, does so with a clear perspectival inflection and, often, thematic, analytical interest. One of the main questions one would ask of a text in this genre would be: “what is it trying to say?” It is precisely this set of characteristics that makes creative documentary a simultaneously rich and problematic tool for academic enquiry. While not the direct focus of this essay, it is worth noting the growing body of literature on creative practice, and filmmaking in particular, as a methodology, including: Bell (2006), Batty & Kerrigan (2018), Black (2019) and Fitzgerald & Lowe (2020).
3
The Faces We Lost, made in 2017, has been screened and commented on widely. Its impact, as well as audience reactions, are thus much more measurable. (Dis)Appear was finished very recently as is just entering circulation.
4
For an exploration of the pragmatic issues around access and the number and availability of journalists at the time as well as the editorial – often outright racist – decisions and policies that governed the coverage of the genocide in international press, see Cieplak (2017: 25–27) and Allan Thompson’s edited collection The Media and the Rwandan Genocide (2007).
5
The footage was shot by Nick Hughes – a British cameraman – on 11 April 1994. See, Cieplak (2017: 126–132) and Thompson (2009). I do not necessarily subscribe to the fetishization of such footage in terms of its superior evidential quality when it comes to documenting atrocity. While discussing the discourse around pellicule maudite – a hypothetical film reel that may or may not have been captured in the gas chambers of the Nazi concentration camps – Libby Saxton reminds us of the debate on this very topic that emerged between Claude Lanzmann and Jean-Luc Godard, and which centred on ‘Godard’s avowed faith in [such images’] ability to bear witness and resurrect’ and ‘Lanzmann’s suspicion of such images, which derives from his awareness of what they do not show’ (2008: 53).
6
The story presented in the film has since been challenged by many Rwandan survivors. See, Hitchcott (2021).
7
It is worth noting that image-based commemoration is relatively marginal in Rwanda and that the majority of the relatives of victims do not have surviving images of their loved ones. In recent years, however, increasing numbers of people share the images of their relatives they do have on social media during the annual commemoration period. Also worth noting is the Art of Memories Initiative, which offers to use photographs as bases for portraits drawn or painted by hand.
8
This is not to detract from the importance of professional photographic practice, which is often crucial in evidencing atrocities, especially as they unfold. It is more to suggest the necessity of extending the attention to different kinds of photographs.
9
At the time of the making of The Faces We Lost, I was aware of only one other film exploring the topic, and in a very different context: Roger: Genocide Baby (2011).
10
Other forms of documentary also usefully problematise other established and enduring concepts, such as ‘authorship’ in the case of participatory documentary work. For a useful challenge to the role of the ‘story’ in documentary, see Lebow & Juhasz (2018).
11
A reasonable counterargument here would be not to have a crew; to shoot on one’s phone or with minimal technology. On paper, this makes sense. However, so many people I have worked with over the years were truly concerned with the level of professionalism the film would display when it was finished. They wanted it to look good. In this sense, filmmaking within academia must include but also go beyond analysis and synthesis. As a filmmaker/researcher who asks people to bare their lives in front of the camera, one wants to make it worth their while. The film must be truthful but also compelling (visually and narratively) for the audience. It’s the combination of these elements that can be seen as doing the stories justice. This is why I am a firm believer that while formal experimentation is important, indeed crucial sometimes, it must be done for a reason and in clear correspondence with the subject matter. It should not be done for its own sake.
12
Of course, I make no claim to objectivity here. The very act of choosing what to shoot, whom to film and how to edit is an explanatory framework that cannot be divorced from my positionality. The dilemma isn’t new. Makers of ethnographic film within anthropology have wrestled with it for almost a century.
13
Emelienne Mukansoro was also involved in the recruitment of the ‘non-professional’ participants in the film.
14
Since these screenings, The Faces We Lost has been consistently used in Rwanda during commemoration ceremonies and in therapy workshops.
15
See: Ludmila Da Silva Catela (2001 and 2009), Emilio Crenzel (2009), Ana Longoni (2010), Claudia Feld (2010a, 2010b and 2014), Augustina Triquell (2012), Vikki Bell (2014) Natalia Fortuny (2014 and 2021), Natalia Magrin (2012), Jordana Blejmar (2016) and Cora Gamarnik (2020) and Piotr Cieplak (2024).
16
La Perla operated as a CDC between 1976 and 1978. It was located on the outskirts of Córdoba. Between 2,200 and 2,500 victims passed through the CDC; and only around 200 survived.
17
Bell Ville is a small city some 200 kilometres from the city of Córdoba.
18
This is also reflected in the recent re-emergence of the debate about whether documentary participants should be paid or not (Tiexiera & Hall 2022).
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a06
Published on: 22 May 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 1 & 2
Article view count: 599
Article download count: 5
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© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Cieplak, P. (2024), ‘(Extra)ordinary images: photography, memory and creative documentary – Rwanda and Argentina’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(1/2): a06 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a06Crossref
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July 2023
From the ‘culture wars’ to reparative histories Gurminder K. Bhambra, Elizabeth Edwards, Margot Finn, Fiona Williams
The ‘culture wars’ that dominate public discourse in the UK turn, very often, on the significance accorded to histories of empire, slavery, and colonialism. What seems to be primarily of concern is the place of such histories in the telling of our national story. In this section, the articles explore different ways in which we could think about the relationship of the past with the present. Specifically, the articles collected here use the frame of ‘reparative histories’ as a potentially more effective way of engaging with complex and contested pasts. They address the idea of a reparatory sociology, colonial photography, representation and indigenous spaces, the gendering of reparative histories, and the need to rethink the welfare state from such a perspective.
22 May 2024
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In light of contemporary ecological challenges affecting our globe, it is increasingly acknowledged that indigenous knowledges are vital for local communities to understand, deal with, and respond to, climate change. Against this background, this article focuses on indigenous religious practices among the Nso’ of the Bamenda Grasslands of Cameroon. The article specifically analyses photographic representations of religious rituals that have shaped, and continue to help, the Nso’ people to accurately forecast climatic conditions and adapt/take precautions. This analysis demonstrates that through photographic narratives the rule of traditional religion in climate forecast can be valorised and exploited to add to the knowledge of climate challenge adaptation. The findings also demonstrate methodologically the role and importance of photographs as a medium for preserving collective and societal memories. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘African ecologies: literary, cultural and religious perspectives’, edited by Adriaan van Klinken, Simon Manda, Damaris Parsitau and Abel Ugba.)
22 May 2024
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