Gerhard-Jan Claes & Olivia Rochette

The Courtisane Festival is this year preparing to celebrate it’s tenth anniversary in style.

Courtisane, in search for relevant and alternative cinematographic forms and experiences brings once again this year a number of surprises. Resistant and poignant, experimental and reflexive, complex and sensual : the selection of works in the programme represent a kaleidoscopic mosaic of styles, media, gestures, languages and emotions; a patchwork of recent and historical works that share an insatiable hunger for experimentation and a creative obstinacy.

On top of the yearly selection of recent film and video works by Belgian and international artists, Courtisane celebrates the work of several “Artists in Focus” : a committed activist filmmaker Sylvain George, a poet of 16mm film Robert Fenz and a seminal avant-garde filmmaker Robert Beavers.  They will each present a selection of their own work as well as a compilation of works by other filmmakers that have influenced their practice.

Two unique encounters of cinematographic ingenuity and singular music improvisation: Sylvain George & William Parker and Robert Fenz & Wadada Leo Smith will also be presented.

Film Socialisme by Jean-Luc Godard, After Empire by Herman Asselberghs and Marxism today by Phil Collins are amongst many of the titles in this year’s festival programme to reveal a combative questioning of the dominant socio-political system, not only in terms of a radical philosophical and activist discours, but also artistically and cinematographically. The question of what “political cinema” can mean  – and what it means to make cinema politically – is the implicit  red thread that runs through the programme of Courtisane 2011.

Taking place from 3o March to 3 April the programme looks to be fuller and greater than ever before. For more information on further events at the festival you can visit Courtisane Festival 2011.

Blue Meridian, Sofie Benoot

María Palacios Cruz considers two very different approaches to dealing with fact through fiction – Sofie Benoot’s Blue Meridian and David Simon’s Treme. Treme – the new TV drama from David Simon, creator of The Wire – is set in post-Katrina New Orleans, and documents the struggles of a city and its people to survive in the wake of natural and political disasters. Those struggles are also at the heart of a recent Belgian documentary film, Sofie Benoot’s Blue Meridian[1], which just as Treme raises the question of blurred boundaries between documentary and fiction in cinema today.

Sofie Benoot is a young Belgian filmmaker freshly out of Sint Lukas Hogeschool in Brussels where she directed her end of studies project Fronterismo under the guidance of Herman Asselberghs, co-founder of the production and distribution platform Auguste Orts together with fellow artists Sven Augustijnen, Manon de Boer and Anouk De Clercq. Auguste Orts is the producer of Blue Meridian, in itself an indication of the fact that we are not dealing with a regular ‘facts and figures’ documentary work. In their founding statement, the Orts artists describe their practice as “…at the crossroads of cinema, video, audiovisual arts, documentaries, experimental films… where media and disciplines cross-fertilize each other”.[2] The purpose of Auguste Orts is to “conceive, start and execute audiovisual art projects in between genres and formats”[3], and Blue Meridian is no exception.

Following the Mississippi River from Cairo, Illinois to Venice, Louisiana, Blue Meridian is a journey through the American ‘Deep South’. If her previous work Fronterismo explored the border between the United States and Mexico along the Rio Grande, here Benoot deals with a border of another kind. As she writes,

“the Mississippi River flows both through the Deep South and the imagination of the American nation; it draws the border between the East and the West of the country, but also the division between the North and the South. As a blue meridian, it represents the complex relation between place and identity in North America.”[4]

Instead of focussing on one of the ‘big themes’ that constitute its inevitable backdrop – Katrina, the financial crisis, the Obama election (shooting started in November 2008) – Blue Meridian gives priority to the ‘small’, untold, personal stories of the people struggling to survive in the cities and towns that she visits along the Mississippi River: Cairo, Vickburg, Columbus, Ferriday… and New Orleans. People who have learnt to live among the traces of frequent natural disasters, racial tensions, economic decline and a turbulent history.

These encounters are the heart of the film, and yet Blue Meridian avoids all sentimentalisms, partly thanks to the distance that Benoot establishes between the camera and the characters she films. She does not judge them, but neither does she praise them nor endorse them. She accepts them for who they are. Redneck confederacy nostalgics, black preachers, convicts, sheriffs, activists and even Jerry-Lee Lewis’s sister cohabit peacefully as characters of the same film. All these people are ‘real’, and yet they often appear to be more ‘fictional’ than the characters from David Simon’s Treme.[5] Why  is that?

There is the way that – at least compared to us Europeans – Americans always seem ready to speak to a camera. Their capacity to create characters out of themselves (“a self-made man” is a familiar expression).

But there is also Benoot’s interest for individual, first-personal stories and as Godard once said “documentary is what happens to others; fiction is what happens to me”. Narrative turns real life into fiction (Godard was echoing Sartre: “the adventure only begins when you start to relate it”). Any documentary narrative is forcibly a work of imagination: in the point of view it adopts, its choices, its minor distortions of an elusive truth.[6]

Ignoring the origins of documentary filmmaking (from the well-ordered way Lumière’s workers leave the factory to Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North), documentary  and mise en scène are often artificially opposed. In Blue Meridian, Benoot has certainly got a way of ‘placing’ her characters in the frame, and in a given setting: in an impressive scene at the beginning of the film, a choir sings Goodbye Mary Jane in the empty streets of Cairo, Illinois. Benoot’s characters don’t look like they are being interviewed, but rather like narrators in their very own decor (and that in spite of the simplicity of Benoot’s mise en scène: most interviews are fixed-camera frontal shots). Benoot defends her filmmaker’s right to shape reality. She writes: “the America I show is scaled down and personalised. I’m not a historian, nor a scientist, or a journalist, but a filmmaker.” [7]

In the September issue of Sight & Sound, Argentinean filmmaker, critic and director of BAFICI (Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema) Sergio Wolff traces the origins of the so-called renewal in Latin American filmmaking during the past decade in the Continent’s recent ‘return of the real’: the documentarisation of contemporary Latin American cinema – “contaminating fiction with the material of the everyday”[8] - and the corresponding fictionalisation of its documentary production. He writes: “the outcome of this process of documentarising of fiction is that films such as Lisandro Alonso’s La libertad (2001) are alternately classified as ‘documentary’ or ‘fiction’”.[9]

According to Wolff, recent Latin-American documentaries seem to no longer want to focus on big characters or address big themes but just like Blue Meridian prefer to rediscover small hidden stories. “The audience doesn’t take away vast amounts of information from fictionalised documentaries, because these filmmakers have decided that their films can deliver the same emotional and aesthetic impact as fiction”.[10] He goes on to question the idea of ‘fiction’ or ‘documentary’ as genres today: “Filmmakers such as José Luis Torres Leiva, (…) seem more ‘fictional’ when they are making ‘documentaries’ and become more documentarian when they are making fiction. Where is the border nowadays?”.[11]

For Wolff, a sign of the reciprocal contamination of fiction and documentary can be found when someone plays his/herself, as well as when fictional characters play opposite real people. Treme – which like traditional documentaries does deal with a ‘major’ theme – confronts real-life characters to fictional ones. Not only are New Orleans musicians such as Kermit Ruffins, Allen Toussaint or Dr John, recurring characters, but also most of the ‘fictional’ characters are shaped after known New Orleans residents. Another interesting example of the interweaving of documentary and fiction in Treme is that of New Orleans native Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, cast as the girlfriend of Wendell Pierce’s character Antoine Batiste. LeBlanc was one of the many New Orleanians interviewed in When the Levees Broke, a television documentary by Spike Lee, who recommended her for Treme.

While Benoot creates a personalised, down-scaled America, Treme’s attention to detail is such that New Orleans native and writer for the local newspaper The Times Picayune, Dave Walker writes a weekly debriefing of each episode’s local references called Treme Explained[12]. While we are certainly taken in by the narrative (it is a series after all) and emotionally moved by its characters, one cannot deny the ‘documentary’ dimension of Treme. After all, would Treme succeed to move us if it wasn’t so real ? As Wolff points out, reality has finally managed to provoke the same – if not bigger – emotional and aesthetic impact than fiction. Our eyes finally open our hearts to the world.

For Wolff, “realising that documentary is not a genre”[13] has freed filmmakers, allowing them to, at the same time, be inventive and draw their inspiration from reality. Sofie Benoot’s Blue Meridian is exemplary of today’s freed documentary film practice, of filmmaking beyond outmoded categories such as narrative, factual or aesthetic; at the crossroads of genres, gestures and formats. A borderline film along a border.

Blue Meridian premieres at Beursschouwburg in Brussels on 24 September 2010.

[1] I must say I’m not altogether impartial to Blue Meridian, having been involved in its production for the past two years

[2] See augusteorts.be

[3] Ibidem

[4] Quote from the film’s synopsis online

[5] As a matter of fact, during a meeting Sofie and I had with a representative of a Belgian Film Fund we had applied for a grant to, I surprised myself thinking for a split second that Creighton Bernette, John Goodman’s Treme character, was one of Sofie’s characters in Blue Meridian

[6] See The Shoah on screen: representing crimes against humanity, Volume 1 by Anne-Marie Baron

[7] Quote from the film’s production dossier

[8] Sergio Wolff, ‘No Turning Back’ in Sight & Sound, vol 20, issue 9, September 2010, p. 17

[9] Ibidem

[10] Ibidem

[11] Ibidem

[12] See http://topics.nola.com/tag/treme-explained/index.html

[13] S. Wolff, op. cit.

About the Author: María Palacios Cruz is a Brussels based curator – she’s a member of the Courtisane collective, and, with Stoffel Debuysere, she curated Impakt Festival 2009.

Courtisane Festival, Gent

Dates: 17-21 March | Location: Gent, Belgium

The uniquely brilliantly Belgian Courtisane has launched a new website, announcing some of the programme for its festival in March.

This year’s Artists in Focus are animation star David O’Reilly and the great Morgan Fisher, whose engaging and clever films work their way between avant-garde cinema, film industry and contemporary art. Plenty more and it’s all in funky Ghent.

Visit the Courtisane website for more information.

It’s the last chance to enter the 2010 Courtisane Festival as the deadline of 31 December looms ever closer. The Courtisane Festival is looking for film, video and media art works for the next festival which takes place on 23-26 April 2010, in Ghent, Belgium. They require that the films or projects must have been completed after 2007 and that any Non Dutch, French or English spoken films/projects should be subtitled.

Apply online here before 31 December 2009.