DThree words, says filmmaker Raoul Peck, sum up the entire history of mankind: civilization, colonization and annihilation. Shortly thereafter he says that a single sentence sums up the history of the western world and the European continent. It comes from Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, where it is said of a colonial criminal and reads “Exterminate the beasts!”. Peck tries to prove both with his documentary film of the same name, which can be seen today on Arte.
It begins with the mock shooting of a Seminole spokeswoman by an American soldier from Andrew Jackson’s army. The Seminoles, a tribe of North Florida Indians who had only emerged in the eighteenth century, had taken in fugitive black slaves whose surrender the white Americans were demanding. After Florida passed from Spain to the United States in 1821, war broke out.
Peck also provides an excerpt from the musical “On the Town” from 1949. Here, led by Gene Kelly, three sailors and their female companions dance through a New York museum of anthropology, “They didn’t have bebop, they had tom-toms”. to make fun of native people and prehistoric people. This is followed by a reference, illustrated with pictures from Stockholm, to a group of Swedish right-wing extremists who had announced in 1991 that “all Jews and Negroes” had to die. Twenty-five years later, a Swedish department store made a nine-year-old black boy the center of its Christmas advertisement and drew racist comments. A montage of torchlight processions, fights and violent phrases from National Socialist and xenophobic movements follows in the film, along with a sequence featuring American presidents invoking the greatness of their country.
A bloody carpet
That’s the first fifteen minutes of the film. It goes like this for four hours. Acted episodes, historical film scenes, snippets from news programs or diatribes, information from adult education centers and the author’s historical-philosophical maxims alternate with one another. It is told from the history of hatred between peoples like the genocides. And it is unrolled in the form of a blood-soaked carpet in which all the violent state crimes of the West are woven and in which they merge: the Congo under Belgian cruelty, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the East India Companies, Donald Trump’s proposition that immigrants are from Mexico not people, but animals, the colonial atrocities that have accompanied the robbery of raw materials since the sixteenth century, the Christian Crusades, Rwanda and Saigon, the Catholic Inquisition that brought up the concept of “impure blood”.
For Peck, all of these events are connected. This is because he is less interested in their special features, even if it is stated right from the start that everyone is unique. Shortly thereafter follows the sentence: “The pictures always look the same.” If that’s the case – the mountains of glasses and shoes from Auschwitz and similar heaps from Rwanda had just been shown – it could speak against pictures. The film is about western crimes. If they were nevertheless committed by Mobutu, Duvalier or the Hutu, i.e. if “white supremacy” cannot have been a motive, he either shows pictures of state visitors from the West who met the violent criminals with an interest in doing business. Or we see how Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton follow the shooting of the terrorist by American soldiers as if the real evil is to be found there. When that is not possible, the West is accused of not helping, as in the case of the Rwandan massacres.
#Documentation #Arte #speaks #bad #pictures