Day 91 : Book Excerpt : Screening Schillebeeckx: Theology and Third Cinema in Dialogue

The Pentagon called for an important meeting in August 2003, predictably, to discuss anti-terrorist strategies. What was of peculiar interest about this meeting was that it was a special screening session for The Battle of Algiers, a film lensed by Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo in 1965. An example of a type of political film known as Third Cinema, “The Battle of Algiers” essays the 1954–1962 Algerian revolt against French occupation and gives ideological visibility to the guerilla-style bombings carried out by the Algerian Liberation Front (NLF) during the turbulent period. The privileged audience of about forty Pentagon officers, along with some civilian experts, huddled to screen Pontecorvo’s film in the hopes of gaining more insight into the motivations and modalities of present day terrorist activities. The obvious lesson for the day: “know thy enemy.”

I am not a big fan of the Pentagon’s activities. Neither is Third Cinema, which casts a gimlet eye on the hegemonic tactics routinely conducted by the globe’s rich and powerful. Yet, ironically, the Pentagon screening session unwittingly confirms the power of Third Cinema; the power to represent and mirror the sociopolitical realities of a Third World that continues to exist, though the zeitgeist would like to believe otherwise. That said, I am convinced that Third Cinema merits regardful consideration and, as in the case of my work, more serious theological attention.

Situated within the interdisciplinary efforts to bridge Theology and Cinema, I explore the ways in which the liberative project of Edward Schillebeeckx’s eschatological perspective is crystallized in Third Cinema. Third Cinema occupies a special niche in Cinema Studies. It is the only major film theory that did not originate from a EuroAmerican milieu. It is also the only type of political film that insists on a dedicated representation of the plight of Third World peoples who continue in the struggle to become agents of their own history in the postcolonial aftermath. Third Cinema is of undeniable value for Third World cultures because it serves as a custodian of subversive memory; a critical counterbalance to the wilful amnesia of dominant western cinema, which almost always insists on the primacy of entertainment value over all other considerations. Films from Hollywood, for instance, usually do not care to examine how the causal structures of social, cultural, and economic inequality impact on two-thirds of the global population. As long as there exists a lopsided global symbolic exchange that separates the metropolitan capitalist First World from its erstwhile colonies in the Third, there will always be a strong case for Third Cinema.

My choice of Third Cinema as a dialogue partner for theology is driven by reasons personal and strategic. Personal because I am not just a scholar committed to the interface of Theology and Film, I am a Filipino, a child of the Third World, in search of soul and story. The films I choose as case studies reflect a world I was born and raised in. By proximity, the title that has the most personal resonance with me is Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare. Tahimik is a cutting edge Filipino filmmaker who paints from the palette of revisionist historiography. For him, hindsight is 20/20. His Perfumed Nightmare, winner of the coveted Berlin International Film Festival Golden Bear in 1978 and a rare Southeast Asian example of Third Cinema, is a re-visiting of the Philippines’ tortured history of multiple colonizations and a subversive filmic re-telling of a collective deep story of liberation. Being a member of the culture in question, I am an involved participant in Tahimik’s postcolonial “exorcism.” But in a wider sense, each of the chosen case study films confirms my membership in, and solidarity with, Third World cultures.

Strategic because I am convinced that the very stylistic signature of the films carry undeniable ideological weight and thus trigger the hermeneutical impulse. The key point for consideration is Third Cinema’s lucid sociopolitical critique and liberative current, situated within the general rubric of “postcolonial struggle.” Through the various elements of cinematic grammar, the films portray, in one sense or another, the collaboration of human and divine agency, while an innervating vision of emancipative praxis looms in the horizon. Here, the divine is identified with the marginalized culture, represented here in synechdoche by the film’s protagonists, whose growing resistance and protest draw them to an alternative future of greater human flourishing. The filmic texts, as such, lay down a bridge for possible creative crossings with theology.

What emerges as a lucid and nuanced discursive framework for a deeper discussion of Third Cinema is Edward Schillebeeckx’s eschatological perspective. The decisive link between salvation and liberation, an unmistakable touchstone of Schillebeeckx’s later theology, has almost completely fallen below the radar of research works in Systematic Theology. Schillebeeckx’s later theology is always immersed in the concrete, historical situation and epistemologically grounded in human liberation. In a personal interview I conducted in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, Schillebeeckx himself affirms that “the liberation of human beings is the golden thread of my theology.” I submit that the depoliticizing tendencies in the reception of Schillebeeckx’s work represents a myopic reading of Schillebeeckx’s later theology and an undervaluing of the continued intercultural relevance and impact of his thought on the Third World situation. From my own Third World optic, I see these tendencies as missed opportunities; the inordinate muting of the prophetic-liberating voice of Schillebeeckx as a credible and significant western mouthpiece for marginalized peoples who are still in the process of finding their own voice amid dehumanizing sociopolitical realities.

~~Screening Schillebeeckx: Theology and Third Cinema in Dialogue -by- Antonio D. Sison

Day 68 : Book Excerpt : The Big Book of Pain

In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, US Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on NBC news. In his statement he obliquely referred to the fact that the US would: ‘work the dark side, if you will. We have to spend time in the shadows’. Precisely what he may have meant by that is open to speculation, but undoubtedly a part of the dark side included what the CIA – in a master-stroke of obfuscation and double talk – now refers to as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. In a December 2004 memorandum the US Justice Department stated that such enhanced techniques as prolonged, forced standing; forcing prisoners to wear hoods; subjecting them to loud noises and deprivation of sleep, food and drink might be considered inhumane but did not constitute torture. That point might be argued by the victims of England’s seventeenth-century Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, who were subjected to identical tortures to the point where they confessed to having engaged in intercourse with Satan himself. In an attempt to clarify the Justice Department’s memorandum – but without actually saying anything at all – spokesman Erik Amblin refused to specify what specific interrogation techniques might be cruel and degrading but would still not qualify as torture. He did say, however, that: ‘acting with the specific intent of causing prolonged mental harm’ would be illegal under US and international law. Does this mean that causing a prisoner to have a mental breakdown is acceptable if it was unintentional? Does everyone have the same tolerance to torture? If not, then do US interrogators call in a psychologist to determine each individual’s emotional and physical threshold to pain before torturing them?

In an eerie reflection of Heinrich Himmler’s order specifying limits on when and how much torture could be inflicted on prisoners, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ on a single prisoner who was being held at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who was suspected of being involved in planning the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Once this genie was officially out of the bottle, and US interrogators realised that censure and punishment for inflicting torture were unlikely to be levelled against them, the practice quickly spread to US forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

In May 2004, pictures of American soldiers, inflicting a litany of torture and abuse on prisoners being held at the Abu Ghraib Correctional Facility near Baghdad, Iraq, appeared on almost every major television network in the world. Like something out of the Middle Ages we saw photos – taken by the perpetrators themselves – of prisoners being beaten, kicked and slapped; their bare feet being jumped on by soldiers in combat boots. In other pictures prisoners were stripped naked and arranged in decorative piles, forced to masturbate and simulate fellatio, dragged around on the end of a leash like dogs and threatened with unmuzzled, attack-trained dogs. When called to account for her troop’s acts, the General in charge of Abu Ghraib at the time of the incident, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, insisted it was all the fault of ‘a few bad apples’. But was it? Or was it a case where the prisoners had been so dehumanised that no-one really cared how horribly they were abused? The ensuing investigation revealed that military interrogators came and went without even being asked to present identification. No authority figures checked on the prisoners’ status or well-being. To complicate matters even more, the prisoners and their guards did not speak the same language. Unless there was an interpreter present the guards had no way of knowing what the prisoners were saying. This in itself made the prisoners seem alien and suspicious.

What is certainly not open to speculation is the later testimony of American military policemen Chip Frederick and Ken Davis; both of whom served at Abu Ghraib at the time of the incident. Frederick stated: ‘It was clear that there was no accountability’, and Davis added:

    As soon as we’d have prisoners come in, sandbags instantly (went over) their head. They would flexicuff them; throw them down to the ground; some would be stripped. It was told to all of us, ‘they’re nothing but dogs’. You start looking at these people as less than human and you start doing things to them that you would never dream of.

~~The Big Book of Pain: Torture and Punishment Through History -by-Mark P Donnelly & Daniel Diehl