Newsreels of silenced experiences

Newsreel Front is an informal collective of workers with a background in the theory and practice of art. It takes newsreels as a type of subversive documentary and essayistic film practice, as the most precious form of political cinema. By confronting past works and the creative initiatives of the present, Newsreel Front tries to reactualize the question of the necessity of committed film journalism in various socio-political constellations.

Building a bridge between the practices of Dziga Vertov and 60s newsreels, the collective continues these practices through the reinvention of the film language of newsreels by introducing technological innovations in production, distribution and film equipment. They focus on social struggles that have little or no media coverage. A couple of newsreels tackle the subject of migration directly. 

As well as “Newsreel 63 – The Train of Shadows” we want to draw your attention to Newsreel 65 – “We Have too Much Things in Heart…”. As members of the collective describe it, the project provides a fragmentary insight into a place which is marked by daily attempts – often unsuccessful – by refugees to cross the border of the European Union, and into the solidarity of the local community. The series of video fragments of interviews with refugees and the people around them who are trying to assist in their struggle are accompanied by a booklet Newsreel Shreds with contributions by Tara Najd Ahmadi, Andreja Hribernik, Jošt Franko, Ciril Oberstar, and Andrej Šprah.

In the essay section of “Newsreel Shreds” Tara Najd Ahmadi reflects: “In the fall of 2020, when I was in the middle of editing an essay film about sleeplessness and its social context, I saw a video fragment that Nika had shot at a refugee camp at the border between Bosnia and Croatia. In this fragment, a man talks about his desire to cross borders while he is getting his beard shaved by another refugee with a knife. He talks about his dreams of being accepted in Europe, and about how the Croatian police beat him and his group ‘like animals’ when they tried to cross the border. He explains his desire by saying, ‘I just want to go to Europe and have a normal life.’ He then pauses and calmly continues, ‘because I want to sleep, do you understand? I have not slept since I was twenty  years old. My only dream is to sleep.’ The rest of his words turn into a poem with one recurring verse, ‘because I want to sleep.’ There is so much that can be said about the systematic brutality that causes his suffering, about the daily trauma that he faces, about a violent life deprived of decency and care, about police, borders, wars, and poverty, and yet the migrant decides to frame his experience in terms of his desire to dream. Peaceful sleep is at the core of what he perceives as his lost right. He refrains from using additional words about the grand scale of the catastrophe that he is experiencing. He simply wants to sleep”.

Jošt Franko goes deeply into the context of one of the Newsreel 65 videos: “On 15 July 2020, around midday, police in full riot gear surrounded the informal refugee camp in the vicinity of Velika Kladuša and bulldozed over the belongings of the people on the move. Their shelter, blankets, sleeping bags and the rest of their belongings were crammed into a large pile and set on fire. The people on the move seemed undisturbed by the commotion and the brutality of state action, proud of the items they had managed to hide and keep – or scavenge and patch up. Among them was a deck of playing cards that a group of Pakistanis pulled from underneath a burning pile of tents and improvised shelters. “Clubs and Diamonds and Spades and Hearts… Queens and Kings and Aces. But we’re all Jokers here,” Mohammad claimed, laughing over the scavenged possession. 
One of the insightful phrases that occurs in Newsreel 65, spoken by one of the protagonists – Zied – is “I will colonize you with flip flops.” And, as Andreja Hribernik notes in her text around it, the phrase uncovers a much bigger issue with the colonial history of Europe: ”He thus simply summed up the tragedy of the people that, due to the politics of the EU, got stuck on their way, barefoot and condemned to languishing on the margins, where today the principles of necropower, as Mbembe defines it, or the mechanisms of thanatopolitics, as Agamben names the phenomenon, are being implemented in the harshest form. Here, the once-colonial principle of exploitation, which still presumed control over the exploited, hoping to gain economic benefit from it, is replaced by the exclusion of certain parts of the population, especially the population that is displaced and useless to society, just like flip flops are useless in colonizing Europe. From a historical perspective, European racism is, as Balibar claims, founded on two mechanisms – colonialism and antisemitism. The European colonial forces drew a large part of their economic progress from their colonies, where they exploited both the resources and the workforce. At the same time, they spread their cultural influence across all the continents.

European history is also marred by the image of concentration camps, where they systematically killed former citizens whom they stripped first of their civil and then of their human rights, and in the end their life. This past is incredibly close if we think that the process of decolonization in the sense of the withdrawal of the administrative and the military apparatus from the colonies began taking place more intensively only after World War Two, while, regarding the cultural and economic fields, the question of colonization by economically stronger countries is still very much present and relevant today. So it seems to make more sense to talk not about the decolonization processes after World War Two, but rather about the transformation of colonization, which moved from a manifestation in the field of politics into the field of the economy. There are people still alive who have direct experience of being deported to concentration camps and living in them. The aliveness of the history of this past and the fear that it is spreading across Europe can today be seen in the rise and revival of islamophobic and xenophobic impulses and an increase in nationalistic movements. At the center of these processes is the image of a refugee, a migrant, which, since 2015, has filled media spaces more intensively than before. This image is distorted, stereotypical, it is an image of a dirty and unschooled bearded man, a terrorist. The relation between a refugee or a migrant and a terrorist actually discloses, as Nail explains, the two main problems of the contemporary nation state: its incapacity to ensure that all its inhabitants have rights and the incapacity and ineffectiveness of its fight against terrorism. Thus, the image of a refugee holds up a mirror to Western civilization and its failed historical projects such as universal human rights, the effectiveness of international intervention etc. Even more, refugees today testify to Europe’s colonial guilt, which haunts us.”

We strongly recommend diving deeper into Newsreel Front’s important work reflecting on different social struggles and especially on migration.