The world is chaotic. To defuse the chaos, we tell stories. And the sense of chaos and confusion is greatest when people have seen war and violence in the face. That's when stories are needed most. That's pretty much how you would describe the new Eye-thematic programme Shell Shock can summarise. The power of stories is the motto of the richly varied package of films and other events. The title refers to the psychological blow with which soldiers returned from the battlefield in WWI.
Films that tell of traumatised soldiers, of refugees and witnesses of incomprehensible tragedies, and how to cope with them. Films through which filmmakers, in their own personal way, try to give shape to the intangible. "Art lets us come home to the trauma called life." That was on the opening night of Shell Shock the closing line of philosopher Hans Schnitzler's spoken column. Thus, since time immemorial, stories have been a way of searching for structure and meaning. Films in particular are ideally suited to show the unspeakable more directly than is often possible with words. This is how programmer Anna Abrahams put it at the opening.
Jacking dogs
So what film scenes do I think of? For example, the pack of dogs scurrying through the streets, which in the stunning animated film Waltz with Bashir (2008) depicts the nightmare of Ari Folman, the Israeli soldier turned filmmaker. In the anti-war film J'accuse (1919) by Abel Gance, the dead of the WWI battlefield rise again to denounce the living. Chilling is the labyrinth of hallucinations in which a veteran in Jacob's Ladder (Tim Robbins) gets entangled. But it could be simpler.
Programmers Abrahams and Ronald Simons have drawn from very different genres, from experimental, cult and virtual reality to blockbuster and classic. The style can be raw and shocking, but also poetic or even comical. From personal testimonies to films that contribute to the collective processing of national traumas.
Personal view
"We chose the films because of the personal perspective they express. Truth-telling was not the goal," Abrahams and Simons state in the introduction to the programme.
So how do you tackle that as a filmmaker? That search for footing in a world where, as the programme booklet states, calm and peace lie like a thin layer over the chaos.
Sometimes very simple. Syrian photographer Issa Touma fled Aleppo in 2012. Now he is returning. In Notes from Aleppo he meets friends and neighbours and shows how people there pick up life again. Awarded the World Press Award for Digital Storytelling.
The extremely tightly and soberly designed short documentary The Atomic Soldiers by Morgan Knibbe has already won awards. Last year a Golden Calf at the Netherlands Film Festival, most recently a director's award from the Dutch Directors Guild. While researching for his first feature film, documentary filmmaker Knibbe (Those Who Feel the Fire Burning) on the last surviving witnesses to US nuclear tests in the 1950s. Now they tell their stories on camera - some for the first time. Gripping testimonies.
Documentary can be direct and confrontational, but fiction need not be inferior to it. Often, the apparent diversions of fiction allows a filmmaker to actually draw out reality even more clearly and eloquently.
Classics
In 1956, when French filmmaker Alain Resnais made the impressive documentary Nuit et Brouillard about the Nazi death camps, he was asked to do something similar with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Again, he hesitated to make a documentary. Felt that as a non-Japanese he shouldn't. He took a completely different tack and approached Marguerite Duras for a screenplay. This is how Hiroshima mon amour (1958), about a French actress who has a brief affair with a Japanese man in Hiroshima. To talk about love and death, war and peace, Duras and Resnais created a bold style in which the cinematic language seeks new ways. This reveals how the lovers both carry their own scars from a past war. Hiroshima mon amour became a great classic that is definitely worth seeing again.
The then highly successful action film First Blood (1982) by Ted Kotcheff is a complete opposite. No poetic experimentation, but a straightforward spectacle starring Sylvester Stallone as the misbegotten Vietnam veteran. Back in America, he battles the police force of a small town. What appears at first glance to be mere popular entertainment did, at the time, play into widely felt frustrations after the Vietnam War ended humiliatingly for many Americans.
Trauma treatment
A similar combination of national and personal trauma also drives the much more complex Taxi Driver (1976), according to many Martin Scorsese's best film. With Robert DeNiro as twisted Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle, who traverses New York as a taxi driver and decides to cleanse the city of scum with bloody action. A raw and at times hallucinatory portrayal from the point of view of the avenging angel Bickle. At the same time, also a relentlessly raunchy portrayal of the times. An image of the time that, I suspect, for today's viewer may also evoke associations with acts of violence labelled as terrorism. Hence my Taxi Driver definitely want to go and see it again.
And when it comes to finding new ways to process gnawing trauma, we also think of the aforementioned Waltz with Bashir. Wrestling with his own war experiences as an Israeli soldier, Ari Folman had the stroke of genius to turn it into an animated film. That way he didn't have to have actors play a fake version of himself, could ignore the limitations of a documentary and still show everything exactly as it was in his head. Who recently made the stylistically related Another Day of Life saw will definitely recognise something.
Live music
The total programme includes over 40 films, lectures and other events. From classics from the archives, such as the newly restored and screened with live music J'accuse, until Sanne Vogels brand new telefilm Summer without mum, about a girl who sees her mother leave for Syria as a war correspondent. There are ex-soldiers reenacting their experiences in a kind of movie theatre in Theatre of War. Also, the unusual documentary The Act of Killing employs a similar formula. The musical theatre So it Goes is based on Kurt Vonnegut's famous book Slaughterhouse-Five on his experiences as a prisoner of war in World War II. These are just a few snatches from what is on offer.
Good to knowShell Shock takes place at Eye Film Museum. It started on 22 March and continues until 22 May. On 20 May, there will be a special wrap-up with a dinner by the water where you will sit down with an asylum seeker. You pay for two.
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