Duncan Campbell: Pt III

III.


Still from It For Others (2013), 16 mm and analogue video transferred to digital video, 54 min. All Images: Courtesy Duncan Campbell and Rodeo, Istanbul/London.

ART iT: In addition to the possibilities of making a film adaption of Capital, another topic that comes up in It for Others is the Western gaze. As we’ve moved into the current period of high globalization, people tend to think of the Western gaze as a relic, whereas it actually still persists, especially in the way that it’s integrated into the Western knowledge system. We live in a de-centered world where the West is still somehow at the center. It was interesting to see how you address that in the film.

DC: I think one of the real achievements of Statues Also Die is that Marker and Resnais took on the issue of the Western gaze. In many ways, the film is not only about the gaze, but also about how the gaze is a contingent thing, culturally specific and the product of particular knowledge systems and desires. I agree with what you say. Since Marker and Resnais’s film, there is a neo-colonial situation that has come about through the establishment of a hierarchy of knowledge systems. That’s based on the assumption that the Western gaze – the Western way of thinking – is universal, and that’s how everybody should think. There’s a great deal of arrogance in that.
The whole question about the repatriation of the objects looted from Africa, now housed in universal museums like the British Museum in London or Musée du quai Branly in Paris, is important not only in terms of ownership but also in terms of deciding who has the right to speak about and contextualize these objects – who gets to tell their stories. The museums control not just the objects, but also what can be said about them. That was my experience when I approached the British Museum about filming the objects. Things became difficult as soon as I mentioned what I was doing. They don’t like the issue of repatriation at all. They consider it to be settled.

ART iT: This brings me back to issues connected to Northern Ireland. Relatively few films from Northern Ireland circulate in the global mass market, whereas quite a number of British and American films have used the IRA as stock villains. For me, an emblematic film reflecting this situation is The Crying Game (1992), which comes across as a liberal attempt to draw humanist relations between the two opposed positions, but ultimately has this strange othering effect that only reinforces the cultural hierarchy. In that sense, do you approach your work from more of an anti-humanist or materialist stance?

DC: I think there are a lot of political problems with the attempt to humanize the situation, especially when it comes from the liberal media in Britain. For a long time, a common refrain regarding the British army, for example, was that many of the troops serving in Northern Ireland are young and come from working class backgrounds, and they’re sent over and don’t really know what they’re doing. But that attempt to humanize the soldiers elides the bigger questions about who sent them there in the first place. I’m not without sympathy for them, and living in Glasgow I’ve met people who were put in a similar situation, but I think the bigger questions get elided. The dominant media neurosis about the situation is that it’s a tribal bloodletting – Protestant against Catholic – which ignores the colonial legacy, and the economic things that underpin it as well.
Actually, the first time I met Bernadette Devlin McAliskey was at a film festival where we talked about my film, as well as about films on Northern Ireland in general. Two films about Bloody Sunday had just come out, and also Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008). Bernadette’s perspective is that it’s almost inherent in a film with major distribution that it has to focus on a certain individual, which means you’re already limiting the perspective, and the politics become skewed, and she objects to such films on that basis. She hadn’t watched Hunger, and couldn’t, because she was very involved in the campaign to support the hunger strikers, which led to the assassination attempt on her life – so it would be personally very difficult for her to watch it. Personally I think Hunger is successful in focusing on the situation as a bodily experience and not feeling the obligation to contextualize it all the time.


Still from Bernadette (2008), 16mm film transferred to digital video, 38 min. 10 sec.

ART iT: In a way Hunger achieves universality by focusing on the most physical aspects of the body, rather than developing a psychological “character” as in other films. And, actually, when you read about what happened with the original inquest into Bloody Sunday, you can see parallels with the police killings of unarmed black men in the US. There’s always the promise of a fair enquiry, which then absolves the crime of state-sanctioned murder.

DC: I think even the most recent enquiry didn’t go as far as some people would have liked. The first – the Widgerey Tribunal – was a total whitewash. Politically, the British Government couldn’t afford an honest enquiry then, whereas now they can, because they see it as a settled, historical issue. It is interesting in terms of the accounts being so disputed for so long. The official account differed so greatly from the experiences of the people who were there and witnessed what happened.
The artist Willie Doherty is from Derry and was on the march. In the 1990s he made a video installation with slowed-down footage from the incident combined with eyewitness accounts. You think that would get you close to the truth of what happened, but what you forget is how difficult that kind of trauma is, how people repress things and find it difficult to express them as a result of being involved in something like that. There’s one part of the installation where a man speaks and you can just hear the emotion in his voice. All he says is, “It was a bad day.” It says so little but so much at the same time, in terms of trying to get at the truth of the matter. It’s not just the trauma of having lived through it, but also the trauma of being told that it didn’t happen the way you remember it. You become implicated and somehow at fault – blame the victim – which is exactly what happened.

ART iT: In a previous interview you said that 10 years ago you wouldn’t have been comfortable working with this material, but now, with distance, you feel people can see it more objectively.

DC: It’s partly to do with me, and feeling ready to do it in a way that doesn’t reproduce some rhetoric or cliché about the situation. But also the stakes are different compared to the early 1990s. There was a lot of propaganda, one way or another, and I’m not interested in producing that. It’s not that I don’t think it has its place – sometimes counter-propaganda is necessary – but that’s not what I want to produce. What I think has happened since then is that people now are able to look at points of view or political positions with which they disagree without reaching for their guns.


Above: It For Others (2013), 16 mm and analogue video transferred to digital video, 54 min. Installation view, Scotland and Venice, Scottish pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2013. Commissioned by The Common Guild for Scotland and Venice. Below: Make It New John (2009), 16 mm film and analogue video transferred to digital video, 50 min. Installation view, “Make It New John,” Artists Space, New York, 2010.

ART iT: Your works tend to operate on both a meta-level and an immediate level, but you’re also dealing with potentially political issues. How do you resolve this dynamic between the meta and the political in your work?

DC: It’s not something I’m trying to resolve. If it’s dialectical, that’s how it operates, because I think in addition to dealing with the history and the politics or the social situation, it’s also important to understand how they’ve been represented and why they are represented in the way they are. I do that with a view to opening it up, and that’s where the audience comes in. I would like to think of what I do as being collaborative. It requires people to be engaged. It’s not a passive experience, and you won’t come away from it knowing everything you need to know about the situation. I want to open things out rather than pursue closure.

Part I | II

Duncan Campbell: Precipitate Relations

Copyrighted Image