2022 Fragment of a filmmaker’s work: Jyoti Mistry Fragment of a filmmaker’s work: Jyoti Mistry
Certain encounters open vast spaces of reflection and exploration. I met Jyoti after seeing her film Cause of Death (2020), and presenting it within several programmes I curated in different contexts. Her film is an essay in feminist history of violence: as if the images explode from the systematically, institutionally engraved laws, norms and tools of discrimination breaking with the ways we read and write history.
To meet Jyoti meant to discover shared spaces: the discontinuities of our spaces, the common search for film languages that grow from these discontinuities and that unearth systemic violence. Part of our encounter is reflected here.
Kumjana Novakova
Kumjana Novakova: In order to arrive to the language we construct with Disturbed Earth (2021) we spent seven years in and out of Srebrenica. In one of our encounters with one of the inhabitants, she described the events of July 11, 1995 minute by minute. I lived through the last two days she spent in Srebrenica, the last two days she spent with her husband, and the last two days she spent with two of her three sons.
One of the most difficult decisions for me as a filmmaker was to film her memories of these last two days of her life before. One of the most complex decisions in the editing was to construct a language from her testimony, without using the testimony itself. Her trauma was, and is, our trauma – had I decided to use her testimony in the film as such, I would have stayed faithful to a fact, but not the process. Moreover, showing her trauma as isolated, I would have relativized it as a painful destiny of a woman. Some woman who have lived through some war in some country.
Similarly, in the two works that form part of your trilogy - When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Black Man (2017) and Cause of Death (2020) – you engage with strategies of representation of trauma. Both individual, and collective trauma, often as an irreplaceable element in the construction of collective meaning, and collectivity itself.
Jyoti Mistry: Violence and the aftermath of trauma are often described as discrete acts and events. In other words, the events of violence result in trauma and these relations are often explained as outside of “normative” lived experiences of people or outside of civil structures. Events like war, genocide and historic forms of oppression (like slavery) have shaped these collective memories of trauma and we think of such events as triggers of trauma. Looking at post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), for example is a result of a rupture with orders of civility. Much of the defining discourses on collective memories of trauma have been developed from Holocaust Studies and the debates on representability are defined with this lens as the framework for these approaches. But trauma may not to be a result of a defining act or singular event but chronic; continuous stress disorder (CTSD), is a result of the social and political structures that produce constant stress, anxiety and unrelenting trauma. When I Grow Up I want to Be a Black Man exposes the historical and political structures of racism that result in a constant threat to the lived-experiences and survival of the black subject, particularly black men. Cause of Death, exposes the social and political structures that have maintained the systemic oppression of women; their (our) bodies always at risk and their (our) subjectivity often defined through women’s reproductive roles in society. By exploring the archive, I was able to draw out new relations to create collective experiences of the black male subject and in the case of the latter film, to collectivize women’s experiences from different histories and geo-political spaces.
In my way of working with archives, the fragment is an important mode in two ways. The first is fragment (as a noun); a segment of what is “left behind” - “the remains” or trace from a whole. This trace serves as a prompt or start towards creating a possible new whole or at least a part of a proposed new relation or reconstruction. It is a way to speculate or imagine new possibilities in how the fragment is used to connect with reconstituted possibilities in the archival catalogue or way to make visible elided histories; those histories that have been left out. This may be described as the speculative fabulation produced from the archival fragment. The second idea of fragment is an act of breaking (as a verb); or to shatter. This breaking or rupturing is significant for how I try to work with the structure of films. I am interested in moving away from certain forms of linearity because in many ways colonial histories or those narratives created and secured ideological positions from rationalizing linear causal relations in these stories to produce power relations. To describe it in concrete terms, colonial histories are written at their inception with the arrival of colonizers and these archives were created to validate the power of colonial rule. The fragments or traces in the archive that I investigate serve to read the experiences of the colonized in the archive and to find ways to disrupt or break that colonial history. It is a way of using fragments and traces in a decolonial strategy towards breaking or fragmenting the linearity of colonial history. In the trilogy, When I Grow Up I want to Be a Black Man (2017), Cause of Death (2020) and the final part Loving in Between (currently in production) I work with fragments from the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam to construct experiences of race, gender and sexuality in each of these respective films. In your film Disturbed Earth (2021), you use the traces in places and fragments from the city of Srebrenica to explore the genocide and show how history – the past is ubiquitous in its presence in that place.
Kumjana Novakova: Disturbed Earth (2021) is a fragment itself: fragment of a possible film.
I will go few steps back in order to elaborate. Similar to your process of work, in Disturbed Earth we worked with the idea of fragment on several levels, and for several reasons. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Srebrenica nowadays are fragmented. Politically, socially, and very much spatially. Past is fragmented, memory is fragmented, present is fragmented, future is fragmented. Thus, to enter that space with the idea to create a filmic representation, in my way of working with a social space, requires a cinematic device that grows from the context. A fragmented society can only be represented by fragments and in fragments. Creating a coherent cinematic space through linear comprehensible narration is dishonest, at the least, and it serves power relations and employs strategies of relativization. Past, present and future in spaces fragmented by war co-exist, as the space is defined by discontinuities. There is no linear time and there is no causality in the way “History” has been, and is written. Time is condensed, as are social relations.
In Disturbed Earth fragmentation, condensation, and discontinuities brought together fragments of archives, fragments of space, and fragments of thoughts – as without fragments of personal reflection engraved in the film, we would have created an unreadable work. Through the cinematic device we certainly disrupted linear, ethnic and nationalistic narratives, or we fragmented them, in the way you suggest in the use of the term as a verb. Thus, Disturbed Earth is still open. It is an unfinished work I guess as are our spaces: a fragment.
Kumjana Novakova and Jyoti Mistry
The screening on Friday 26 August at 2.30 p.m. will continue the dialogue between the two filmmakers with the help of numerous film extracts.