Let us imagine a film festival on surveillance under extreme conditions, where every single screening – irrespective of the genre, period, approach, and author – would be introduced by the same film: Gefängnisbilder / Prison Images (Harun Farocki, 2001, Germany). Farocki as “archeologist of the present” (Blümlinger) dedicated many of his works to surveillance.1 His “poetics of the trace” gives an account of the contemporary “politics of the trace”, as Miriam de Rosa puts it:
Reflecting on the way of structuring his cinematographic aesthetics of surveillance Farocki appears provocative as well as engagé and provides a dense interpretation of practices that feature everyday life in both an acclaimed and a subtle way – practices that draw our attention to the production and the consumption of images and determine not only the regime of vision but also the condition of the subjects involved in the scopic activity (de Rosa 2014, italics in the original).
But how Gefängnisbilder might affect the reception of the thematically selected and formally connected films would depend on many factors. The power – or in some cases the art – of curatorial practice comes from a careful review, selection and combination of the right artefacts.
The Secret Police Film Festival was curated by an international team: András Mink, Ioana Macrea-Toma, Piotr Wcislik and Zsuzsanna Zádori. The wide range of institutional facilities to which they had access made selection of material difficult, but the excellence of the results speaks for itself. The Vera & Donald Blinken Open Society Archive in Budapest, the festival’s host institution, is a research centre where traces of the Cold War, the socialist past and many other collections are professionally preserved and reinterpreted through cultural and academic programmes and events.
One festival strand, Moving Walls 22 / Watching You, Watching Me, opened in October 2015.2 Its photos and installations were not just a perfect backdrop to the film event in Galeria Centralis, but they offered an intellectual psyching up for visitors. Born with the widespread use of photography and continued with moving images, the ghost of the scopic regime was thus invoked, and the contemporary experience of surveillance – social, political and personal – evoked.
The festival programme comprised six events and included, first, screenings of some Communist secret police training and operative films, and, fascinatingly, contemporary surveillance-themed documentaries using secret police films. The screenings mapped nearly the whole European Communist region: Czechoslovak, East-German, Hungarian, Polish and Romanian moving images. Coincidentally, in November, the 12th edition of the VERZIO International Human Rights Film Festival also focused on surveillance, with an excellent selection of contemporary documentaries curated by Oksana Sarkisova, the festival director.3 The German production, Engelbecken (Gamma Bak, Steffen Reck, 2014, Germany), linked the two programmes by being screened in the OSA with a follow-up discussion with the directors.
The different events were intended to attract diverse audiences. Those interested in contemporary art and photography, in human rights, in technological changes and the political history of surveillance, in visual media practices, and in documentary film were able to integrate and filter all these topics through personal experience. The curators thus created a film programme with multi-faceted material, balancing archival materials with reflections upon them. Information on the Communist past was transmitted professionally and with proper contextualisation, connecting it to our almost naturalised social and visual surveillance experience.
A few examples will show how successful the programme was, even without the imagined Farockian introduction. Most of the events involved screenings of archival films and contemporary documentaries focusing on a specific country. The first selection included training films produced by the special police film studio of the Hungarian Ministry of Internal Affairs. Its archive was not destroyed but preserved by the Artistic Director of the OSA Miklós Tamási, who wrote the script for Zsigmond Gábor Papp’s documentary Az ügynök élete / The Life of an Agent (2004, Hungary). The training films included Belső figyelések végrehajtása során alkalmazott dokumentációs eszközök / Documentation Methods Used in an Interior Surveillance (1975, Hungary) and Titkos letartóztatás / Secret Arrest (1973, Hungary). While watching them I wondered why these tutorials for secret agents exposed the viewer to an almost anthropological observation by examining clothes, hair-style, furniture, architecture? One might feel uncomfortable watching scenes shot in everyday situations and ordinary places. The double surveillance makes the whole training painfully absurd: the techniques are funny and frustrating at the same time. We have to watch how agents were supposed to use handbag cameras to observe, record, and, later, report private encounters with targeted persons. This ambiguity is highlighted by Zsigmond Gábor Papp. He inserted a “pseudo-archival” film between the film chapters; fictional footage shot by the agents, accompanied on the soundtrack by their naturalistic and nasty dialogues. Anxiety can grow into disgust when one recognises familiar places – as it happened to me with Titkos letartóztatás. I could identify my hometown, the locales of my childhood where ordinary citizens involved in the filming were forced to collaborate and keep silent about it. Personal memories evoked by the archival footages is an experience that cannot be compared to anything else: disgraced memories, the worst form of nostalgia one can ever have.
The all-pervasive fear and anxiety – to be watched, caught, accused, or forced to become an agent – was turned upside down in the next operative film of the programme, Titkos házkutatás / Secret House Search (instructional film, 1960, Hungary), where the agents are taught how to avoid revealing the details of a secret raid. Who fears whom? As the narrator says: “A well-prepared enemy expecting a house-raid can apply a number of security measures. Should we disregard them, we are endangering the secret house-raid. (...) Make sure not to leave any tell-tale signs so you prevent the uncovering of the secret house raid.”
The target persons whose house is being searched are represented as reactionary internal enemies of the system. The rich director of an international company and his wife, who spends her weekdays in the famous Budapest spa, are reminiscent of the bourgeois past. They are set against the heroes of the next film, Supravegheat de Securitate în anii ’70-’80 / Under Surveillance by the Securitate 1970-1980 (Nicolae Mărgineanu, 2009, Romania) about Romanian intellectuals who were watched by one of the harshest Communist secret police, the Securitate. This historical documentary is formally less innovative than others of the time, although its archival footage and interviews with citizens who were under surveillance provide a good historical background. And yet, the dry, factual information is just as shocking as when the viewer learns the consequences of the surveillance through destroyed human fates.
The Polish film selection had the most complex structure highlighting a personal tragedy under the pressure of dictatorship. In the first operative film, Dwanaście filmów operacyjnych / A Chronicle of Operations (1968-1976, Poland), we witness an unusual event in the midst of everyday life: a man pouring petrol on himself during an agricultural festival at a Warsaw stadium in 1968.4 His action was recorded by coincidence, as the festival was surveilled by the secret police. The protest is contextualised by the dispassionate voice-over narration, giving a short description of the action, and the non-diegetic emotionally detached classical music (typical of training films). In order to enrich the context, two newsreels introduced PESEL, the identification system that has been used in Poland since the socialist era. Finally, a lyrical documentary made by the excellent Polish director Maciej Drygas Usłyszcie mój krzyk / Hear My Cry (1991, Poland) revealed the story behind the suicide. Ryszard Siwiec was an ordinary man who set fire to himself. In the middle of a huge crowd, he thereby created an extraordinary memory for close relatives and eyewitnesses to whom his suicide seemed a “vain”’ and “pointless” act. The establishing shot zooming in on his photograph on the wall of his flat and the well-chosen, powerful music accompanying the archival shots from the first film make the viewer reflect not only on the political past but on one’s own relation to it as well.
The most extended system of our relationship to the socialist past, its solidity, and surveillance practices, was revealed in the films about the former East Germany, which after the reunification with the Federal Republic of Germany became exemplary in memory politics. The protagonists’ and directors’ personal stories and the Q&A of Engelbecken formed the climax of the film festival. The first-person voice-over and the subjective visual narration highlighted the difficulties of coping with the past. The cross-border love and the hunger for freedom juxtaposed with the secret police files reflected the ambiguous regime. Even more bewildering was another documentary from the VERZIO surveillance programme, co-directed by the provocative Eyal Sivan: Aus Liebe zum Volk / Love You All (Eyal Sivan, Audrey Maurion, 2004, Germany, France). The narrator, Mr. B., is the only protagonist in the surveillance programme who was a secret agent, an officer of the East German Stasi. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he makes a “confession” of his blind faith and subsequent disillusions in front of the imagined audience. Meanwhile, we observe his Stasi office in detail as if witnessing a subversive house raid.
The last programme integrated nearly all of the festival’s themes. The video-artist and film director Péter Forgács has been described as an “alchemist-archeologist filmmaker” (Nichols-Renov: 2011). His compilation documentary NémetEgység @ Balatonnál – Mézföld / GermanUnity@Balaton – Honeyland (2011, Hungary), is the result of exhaustive research assembling amateur and Stasi films, as well as many official and personal documents to recall the era of the divided Germany and their citizens’ secret encounters at Lake Balaton. The documentary is based on an installation first exhibited in Berlin and then in Balatonfüred, Hungary.5 Despite the use of the same research material the exhibition and the documentary show essential differences. In Balatonfüred, the photos, documents, home movies, secret agent films and reports, as well as the narratives of the eight protagonists were displayed separately, connected only by Forgács’s poetic approach. They had an independent (life)world, and yet, shared the same (social, geographical and cultural) space of the “Hungarian sea” (cf. Pócsik 2010). Lake Balaton, where West Germans used to meet East Germans, was under the surveillance of the Hungarian Ministry of Internal Affairs in collaboration with the Stasi, its special “Balaton Brigade”. The exhibition and the documentary present eight very different life-stories: East German tourists, West German relatives, Hungarian hosts and Stasi agents. Thus, the different methods of recollection were assembled in a mosaic-like fashion, reflecting the complexity of the socialist past at Lake Balaton, while creating its cultural geography. Visitors were able to spend as much time as they wanted in each world. In the documentary, Forgács uses all his usual formal devices to share the unique information from personal and secret police archives; and yet, he sometimes creates a sunny atmosphere through depictions of the popular culture of the seventies.
A film festival obviously cannot encompass all the issues around the functioning of the secret police, the mechanisms of collection, compilation, access, and archiving (cf. Schiller-Dickhut/Rosenthal 2009). Nor can it comprehensively map the differences in the surveillance practices of all the post-socialist countries. And yet, the documentaries screened in the VERZIO thematic surveillance programme, like Citizenfour (Laura Poitras, 2014, USA/Germany), highlighted the sad actuality of such issues nowadays.6 Although the power relations and tools used to perpetuate them during the socialist era and now differ greatly, one still can draw certain parallels. Today, when the constantly debated fluid digital identity with its blurred private and public boundaries is at stake, the control and disciplinary devices are not simply technologically different: our perception of them has changed dramatically. Farocki begins his film with archival footage of mentally handicapped people from the beginning of the twentieth century: he ends it with an American high-tech prison courtyard. The ways we attribute meaning to human gestures, to interactions in front of surveillance equipment, as well as the ways we differentiate the states of seeing and of being seen depend on our social and visual experiences.
Contemporary art can enrich this experience, interweaving into its textures historical knowledge, cultural and personal memories. For example, the exhibition Meaning in Budapest’s Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center is, if not a continuation then an excellent extension of the OSA surveillance programmes.7 It is beyond the scope of this review to go into detail, but as a conclusion let me point out Péter Forgács’s contribution. In 2014, he and his brother, the writer András Forgách, had to cope with the shock of discovering that their mother was a secret agent. Forgács’s personal story is the most tragic and yet, in its mediatised form, it is also the most liberating one. He began his key work, Jelentéstulajdonítás / Attribution of Meaning (2015, Hungary), as early as in 1982 in the Balázs Béla Studio in Budapest, the experimental filmmaking laboratory that brought together the best underground artists and scholars of the time. In this video, Forgács uses his own private archive to create an experimental film featuring, among other relatives, his mother. She was still reporting at that time. Gábor Bódy, Forgács’s mentor who introduced feedback and delay techniques to him and whose theoretical works provided Forgács’s title, is a protagonist in the second part of the exhibition.
Forgács created what he called a “time carpet”, arranged according to his mother’s agent activities. This used his own family photos, diary notes, other people’s manipulated photos, and the reports of fellow agent Gábor Bódy, which are set alongside a photo of the young Forgács. Before committing a suicide, Bódy made his last feature film about disappearing traces. His last run through the Budapest night became emblematic of the 1980s. His real person, both the one his friends knew as Gábor Bódy and the agent known only to the secret police, and his “filmic trace”, are invoked in a recognisable, unified form, just like Forgács’s mother. Analysing another Farocki’s work – Auge/Machine I-III / Eye/Machine I-III (2001-2003, Germany) – de Rosa uses the notion “restitution” coined by Didi-Huberman in his famous theory of images. She writes:
The risk posed by this virtual life of the filmic trace is to mistake it for the subject, confusing their ontological nature: the former lives simultaneously in presence and absence and is set in a dimension between past and present that I would define – borrowing Georges Didi-Huberman’s formulation – as the dimension of “restitution” (de Rosa 2011).
For me, Forgács’s installation became a restitution also in the original meaning of the word: to set up again, to restore, to rebuild, and to revive memories through technical images – photocopies, photographs, video footage. By sheer coincidence, Bódy also appeared to festival visitors in Engelbecken – in an innocent handwritten notebook entry of the protagonist Gamma Bak. Bódy and Bak had an appointment in West-Berlin where Bódy was allowed to teach and work. He built an international network and considerably influenced the contemporary film and media scene – who knows, maybe for his secret agent reports as part of a deal with the secret police.
Pázmány Péter Catholic University
Bill, Nichols, and Michael Renov. 2011. Cinema’s Alchemist. The Films of Péter Forgács. Minneapolis.
de Rosa, Miriam. 2014. “Poetics and Politics of the Trace: Notes on Surveillance Practices Through Harun Farocki’s Work.” NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies, http://www.necsus-ejms.org/poetics-politics-trace-notes-surveillance-practices-harun-farockis-work.
Pócsik Andrea. 2010. “Az ’ellenőrzött szabadság’ színei, hangjai, ízei, illatai (Német egység a Balatonon – Egy európai történet).” Pannonhalmi Szemle 18 (4): 117–23.
Schiller-Dickhut, Rainer, and Bert Rosenthal. 2009. The “European Network of Official Authorities in Charge of the Secret-Police Files”. A Reader on Their Legal Foundations, Structures and Activities. Berlin.
Website “Surveillance. Secret Police Film Festival”: http://www.osaarchivum.org/events/Surveillance-Secret-Police-Film-Festival
Bak, Gamma, and Steffen Reck. 2014. Engelbecken. GM Films.
Belső figyelések végrehajtása során alkalmazott dokumentációs eszközök / Documentation Methods Used in an Interior Surveillance. Training film. 1975.
Drygas, Maciej. 1991. Usłyszcie mój krzyk / Hear My Cry. Telewizja Polska.
Dwanaście filmów operacyjnych / A Chronicle of Operations. Operative film. 1968.
Farocki, Harun. 2001. Gefängnisbilder / Prison Images. Harun Farocki Filmproduktion.
Farocki, Harun. 2001-2003. Auge/Maschine I-III / Eye/Machine I-III. Harun Farocki Filmproduktion.
Forgács, Péter. 2015. Jelentéstulajdonítás / Attribution of Meaning.
Forgács, Péter. 2011. NémetEgység @ Balatonnál – Mézföld / GermanUnity@Balaton – Honeyland.
Mărgineanu, Nicolae. 2009. Supravegheat de Securitate în anii ’70-’80 / Under Surveillance by the Securitate 1970-1980.
Maurion, Audrey, and Eyal Sivan. 2004. Aus Liebe zum Volk / Love You All. Les Films du Paradoxe, Piffl Medien.
Papp, Zsigmond Gábor. 2004. Az ügynök élete / The Life of an Agent.
Poitras, Laura. 2014. Citizenfour. Radius-TWC.
Titkos házkutatás / Secret House Search. Instructional film. 1960.
Titkos letartóztatás / Secret Arrest. Training film. 1973.
Pócsik, Andrea. 2016. Review: “Surveillance. Secret Police Film Festival”. Ghetto Films and their Afterlife (ed. by Natascha Drubek). Special Double Issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 2-3. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2016.0002.14
URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/
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