Uploaded 6 November 2002

After the Fact: Truth, Testimony and the Law in Human Rights Documentaries

The ugly reality of human rights abuses is that they are rarely independently witnessed. Hence, any investigation of such abuses, should it occur, relies heavily on the testimony of survivors “after the fact”. Two common arenas of investigation into human rights abuses are the law and documentary, and it seems to me that they face similar problems in their quest for “truth”. My interest here is in looking at three human rights documentaries produced recently, each of which is structured around a legal or quasi-legal process designed to investigate a particular human rights situation. They offer an elegant telescoping of a number of issues concerning human rights.

The ideas behind this study developed while I was distributing a recent documentary of my own, Punitive Damage (New Zealand, 1999). [1] The feature-length film, which took me four years to complete, follows the story of Helen Todd, a New Zealand woman who sued an Indonesian general in Boston after her son was killed in East Timor in 1991. While on the film festival circuit, I became aware of several other films that bore striking similarities to my own. Calling the Ghosts: A Story About Rape, War and Women (USA, 1996) is structured around testimony given by two women, childhood friends and legal professionals, who lived lives of ordinary modern women in Bosnia until their neighbours raped and tortured them in a concentration camp. [2]  Long Night’s Journey into Day (USA, 2000) a documentary on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, explores the family and community background to various “case studies” brought before the Commission. Hence, the film looks at the devastating effects of apartheid on both the past as well as the future of South Africa. [3]

That these documentaries all highlight a political and historical situation that has given rise to grievous abuses of “domestic” populations is not unusual: there has been a tradition of this kind of documentary. [4]  But what struck me forcefully was that all three, to a greater or lesser extent, used the vehicle of legal or quasi-legal organizations to explore specific human rights issues. I started to ponder first why these documentaries-and indeed the legal processes at their hearts-had emerged at this particular time in history. What interested me too was that the documentaries, each of which would largely be described as “realist”, had a kind of double dependency on testimony. Both law and documentary are similarly dependent on witnessing in their attempts to ascertain “truth”. But having been well-schooled in structuralist thought and film studies, I knew that the “truth”-manifest in documentary and law-was not to be readily trusted. This was an intellectual position that I had continuously negotiated, somewhat painfully, while producing my own documentaries. I welcomed the chance to examine how other documentaries grappled with an issue that seemed so burning to me.

There were other similarities amongst the films too. Through theatrical, television and video release, they each reached sizable, if not “mass”, audiences. In addition, their distribution extended beyond the film and television circuit to the political sphere. The grassroots “human rights” activists, exemplified by organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, are adept at using media as a political tool and readily provided vehicles for screenings, tours and discussions. But the films reached more established institutions, too, such as the US Congress, various houses of parliament, and the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Hence, the documentaries were able to straddle mainstream media outlets, with political organizations.

Then there was the question of gender. Initially, I took the fact that all three films were made by women as coincidental but, on reflection, changed my position. Moreover, two of the documentaries, Calling the Ghosts and Punitive Damage, also have women as key characters, while in the third, women-mothers-are not necessarily central, but remain the most resonant presence in the film. Within the three documentaries the women “characters” testify against abuse that is gendered in nature. These women speak as female victims: they themselves have been raped or abused sexually; they recall, as mothers, their children and families killed or tortured; they talk of the difficulties of providing family cohesion, taking on the roles of nurturing and providing, under conditions of war.

The following article attempts to articulate the positions that have emerged from my reflections on these three films around the interconnecting nexus of politics, international relations, documentary studies and gender.

The Ethics of Intervention

What was unusual about the three works was not that they were about human rights issues as such, but rather that they all documented, to a greater or lesser degree, legal or quasi-legal processes. To explore the emergence of the documentaries one must look first at developments within the realm of international law itself over the last decade. I found that Michael Ignatieff’s work The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and Modern Conscience provided a useful, though flawed, framework within which to discuss the political shifts that have given rise to a proliferation of legal cases and indeed, to the documentaries themselves. [5]  Ignatieff charts a rise in “moral interventionism” that has occurred since the end of the Cold War. To explain the new interventionist mood, he sketches two world narratives that coexist today. The first is that of “globalization”, which ties countries together through economic and communication infrastructures that make them, if not allies, at least peaceful competitors in an interconnected world. He refers to these regions, generally relatively affluent, as “zones of safety” (although I think he fails to acknowledge that they themselves often contain pockets of despair). The second narrative that has arisen in this post-Cold War world is that of “chaos”. Regions in Africa, Asia, the former Yugoslavia, former Soviet Union, and Latin America he sees as drifting out of the global economy into a state of semi-permanent violence. Ignatieff calls these areas “zones of war” and claims that the two zones, of safety and war, increasingly do not connect.

Ignatieff argues that the fragmentation of nation-states that occurred at the end of the Cold War is to blame for the chaos. He does acknowledge that this fragmentation is the result of imperial histories that created the nation-states in the first place. The effects of colonization, with its record of general plunder is well-documented, as is the colonial tendency to embroil indigenous peoples in superpower conflicts not of their own making. However, Ignatieff goes on to claim that there is now a genuine breach between the two worlds-the “globalised” and the “chaotic”-and points to the fact that the affluent nation-states have no further investment, financial or ideological, in these stricken regions. However, in citing a breach, Ignatieff fails to analyze the roots and effects of globalization. Some would counter his position, claiming that the “forces of globalization” are in effect a corporate neo-colonialism, and that the violence that continues in these “regions of chaos” are in large part, the result of a continued economic exploitation. [6] Having depressed labour costs and mined resources, globalization has enriched affluent regions at the expense of the poor. The “breach” then would be an illusion, possible only because the beneficiaries of globalization are more adept at disguise than the older style of colonial exploitation.

What is indisputable, however, is that into this breach-be it real or just apparent-has stepped a plethora of organizations, dominated by UN peacekeepers and prominent NGOs, such as the Red Cross, Medicins sans Frontieres, and development and aid agencies. What they do is hard graft, undertaken, as their death toll indicates, at some considerable risk. Given the diminished role many powerful states play in existing world conflicts, it is the human rights activists alone that foreground a connection between Ignatieff’s two worlds, the “zones of safety” and the “zones of war”. It is they who attempt to alleviate the “misery of strangers”. But their relationship to the communities within which they work is complicated. Although such organizations are defined as “international” rather than “national” in their base, most often come from the “zones of safety”. Many working for the U.N., for example, must be all too aware of the political forces behind the desperation they witness, yet are limited by the heavy hand of the United States and the Security Council. The limits of the role that they can take on, the demand that they be politically neutral, has led to some terrible mistakes, some occurring in regions relevant to this discussion here-East Timor, Rwanda, and Sbrenecia. There are welcome indications, I hasten to add, that the U.N. is attempting to address its past actions – or the lack of them.[7]

It is here that the complex politics need teasing out: with the legacy of empire a step away in the past, and globalization politically implicated, “intervention” – economic, military, political -may just be a contemporary version of imperialism. As the West’s critics have stated: Can intervention in fact exacerbate conflict?
What right does any power have to intervene in the affairs of a sovereign nation? This latter query is legitimate, given the role that imperial powers played in creating these so-called sovereign nations in the first place. Yet the question remains, what can be done when self-determination fails, when civil war or famine destroys a polity as it has in large swathes of the world?

Despite the uncertainties, this wave of humanitarian internationalism is set to continue; it is a time when strict national sovereignty is challenged and a new era of intervention has begun. This apparent refurbishment of the Enlightenment heritage of universal human rights, the emergence of vast constituencies of human rights activists, development workers and aid experts appear to have, as their moral rationale, the indivisibility of human interests and needs.

International law lies within the “judicial camp” of moral interventionism. In fact, fortuitously for this study, each documentary deals with a different legal entity – a war crimes tribunal, a truth commission, and an individual law suit respectively. These in fact are three major forms of law used to address political crimes since the end of the Cold War.

The U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague appears towards the end of Calling the Ghosts. Convened to deal with the violent dissolution of former Yugoslavia, it is the first such tribunal to be instituted since Nuremberg. Since the formation of the tribunal, rape has been recognized as a war crime. [8]  The second legal process is the Truth Commission, exemplified by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa depicted in Long Night’s Journey into Day. Truth Commissions are generally convened by newly democratic states attempting to rebuild nations and reconcile warring factions after a period of devastation. The third use of the law is the individual legal case, brought by human rights lawyers, in conjunction with a complainant who has suffered some form of loss or abuse. Helen Todd’s case at the centre of Punitive Damage was possible because of her determination, smart committed lawyers and a loophole in American law. Despite their civilian and local character, these trials can function as precedents for broader political actions. For example, the case against the former dictator of Chile was initially brought by a Spanish law firm while Augusto Pinochet was in England receiving medical treatment. Although eventually released from extended detainment in the U.K. after diplomatic pressure was exerted by Chile, Pinochet returned home to unexpectedly face further legal action and the overturning of his amnesty. There have been further twists and turns. In July 2001, the Santiago Court of Appeal ruled Pinochet “not fit to stand trial by reason of ill-health”. As I write, he remains free from indictment. But other former dictators no doubt have taken note of the Chilean example.

Our assessment of the political efficacy of these documentaries must surely extend out from our judgment of the legal processes that they cite-and beyond that, how we understand the “moral interventionism” of our age. Is this desire to intervene merely a continuation of the imperial need to interfere and control? Of if-and this is a qualified “if”-if this moral interventionism, as ambiguous and confused as it has been at times, functions to alleviate the “misery of strangers”, could we argue that these films function politically as part of this process of intervention? Their role in highlighting human rights abuses, shedding light on the political histories, and maintaining a sense of connectedness, involvement and concern between the zones of safety and the zones of war could then be justified.

Documentary and Legal Process

The popularity of court cases and the law in both fiction and non-fiction films is indisputable, something certainly many documentary makers recognize. The attraction to such programming stems from the “law and order” genres’ ability to deliver certain pleasures: legal processes have drama, emotion, provide coherence, and tap into a utopian desire for universal justice. Moreover, there can be distinct practical purposes in using court material. In my search for documentary subjects for example, I found that I used similar criteria to the lawyers working with Helen Todd in her court case against Sintong Panjaitan. I seek people who are involved in an issue, who can represent a community, and who can articulate themselves and their positions clearly. This meshing of process allows a ready incorporation of legal material into a documentary.

In Calling the Ghosts, for example, the War Crimes Tribunal against Yugoslavia appears towards the end of the project. Produced on tape over a three-year period, the documentary traces the story of two Bosnian Muslim women, Jadranka Cigeli and Nusreta Sivec. The two friends were both attorneys, who were repeatedly raped and abused in the Omarska concentration camp by Serbian militia. But although the recollection of abuse, the rapes, tortures, smell of burning flesh, screams, is harrowing enough, it occupies a relatively small portion of their testimony. Rather, the documentary charts their decision to speak out, the pain and necessity of doing so, and their commitment to gathering further testimony. Calling the Ghosts, as Patricia Zimmermann suggests, tells of “the problem of speaking itself as an act of survival, political resistance, and finally feminist organizing”. [9]  The difficulty of speech is evident in the women’s gestures; they find it difficult to make eye-contact; their hands flutter in front on their faces, as if to disguise their identities. The documentary “summons the spectator to both listen and act, to move beyond the self as Jadranka and Nusreta move beyond the rapes,” Zimmermann continues. [10] This movement, the tape demands, must be towards political and legal accountability, exemplified by the Tribunal. Hence, the political process appears late in the documentary, as a kind of culminating moment. Its presence raises the hopes that the painful recollections will be listened to, and that the authority of an international court of law matters.

The civil law suit Helen Todd brought against Indonesian general Sintong Panjaitan, forms the spine of the documentary, Punitive Damage, off which other materials were hung. The case was, of necessity, “recreated”, as no existing footage of the court proceedings remained. This recreation, however, was complex. On the one hand, it used the “real” people from the trial, the three witnesses and two lawyers. (The accused Panjaitan himself had skipped the US once he was served with papers). Hence, audiences, who could identify the witnesses from elsewhere in the film where they appeared in interviews, could read their testimony as “authentic”. On the other hand, we filmed the witnesses against black backdrops, indicating clearly that they were not in a proper courtroom. While it was evident to the audience that this was not an “authentic” document, the witnesses responded to the lawyers’ questions as truthfully as they had in the real court of law. Overall, the testimony was invaluable to the structure of the documentary. Together, the witnesses delivered material, in a style that was succinct, historically informed and emotional, the story of the young New Zealander who had died, Kamal Bamadhaj, and the East Timorese. Despite the evidence of the “recreation” and maybe because of it, the law-suit functioned to transmit critical political truths. When queried about the quality of her “performance” subsequent to the release of the film Helen Todd told a journalist that she had no need to act, given that justice at the time of filming had still not been adequately served. Although Panjaitan had been found guilty, the court was unable to enforce that conviction. The Western powers were unwilling to intervene and the General himself, back in Indonesia, had been promoted.

As with Punitive Damage, representations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are woven throughout Long Night’s Journey into Day. As a “real” documentation using actual court footage, it is more directly about the legal process than the other two documentaries. However, it uses the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in part as a tool to examine the legacy of apartheid. Structured as a series of case studies, the documentary explores the “back story” to a series of presentations to the Commission. Most moving in the film are the testimonies of relatives of the “disappeared” or murdered. Many had simply not known what had happened to their loved ones. Others had been fed lies and distortions. Their confrontation with the torturers and killers from the apartheid regime was bound to be highly emotional, something the documentary readily transmits. As the film explains, amnesty from the Commission is considered only if two conditions are met. First, there must be full disclosure of a perpetrator’s involvement and role, and second, the actions taken must be judged the result of the political turmoil of the time. The film puts the audience in the position of juror-we have to assess whether we believe we have heard the full story, whether the character is truly remorseful, whether the actions stemmed “naturally” from apartheid. Spectators are not only drawn into the emotions expressed, but are actively engaged in considering guilt and history.

In all three documentaries, the subject/witnesses provide the backbone of the documentaries, providing narrative coherence and basic structure. A problem that the documentaries share with legal processes share is determining the veracity of these central “characters”. The nature of human rights abuses, as I indicated above, means corroborating evidence is difficult to find. Evidence in a court case is generally amassed through paperwork, affadavits, and supportive witnesses. The equivalent in the documentary manifests itself generally as visual evidence, that is, images that confirm what is being described, or interviews that verify the main subject’s interpretation or recollection of events. Very often, in human rights documentaries there are simply no images to draw on, just as there is little corroborating evidence in a human rights trial or tribunal.

The supporting material used to supplement the testimony falls into four general categories. The first is that of evocative cutaways-for example, in Calling the Ghosts, the images of the Omarska concentration camp, where the rapes and abuse had occurred, are depicted frequently-but were clearly filmed at a later date. The industrial buildings are forlorn and empty, and combined with an eerie sound track, can only evoke, but not confirm, the torture that took place within their walls. This strategy replicates Renais’ Night and Fog (France, 1955) with its interlacing of archive and “contemporary” footage. [11]  In Long Night’s Journey into Day the barren beauty of the African landscape is used similarly. You can sense that blood has soaked the red soils, but the image, alone, cannot explain how it got there. In Punitive Damage, Kamal’s sister Nadiah stands by his grave, but even the existence of a grave cannot prove his death. As she explains, by the time his body was exhumed from a mass grave in East Timor, he was unrecognizable even to his mother. Uncertainty remains whether the body under the headstone is indeed Kamal’s and she remarks with wry, sorrowful humour, “Who knows? It might just be a Timorese buried here”.

Archival footage is also used either to illustrate, or in counterpoint to, the testimony. Television news coverage is deployed in a self-conscious manner, indicating that the documentary makers recognize that the material cannot be used simply to confirm what is said by a subject/witness. Although it can provide background information and visual illustration, TV news is also presented in all three documentaries as a cultural construct in itself. In their use of news footage, in fact, the documentaries make comment in various ways. At times, they point to how vital certain coverage was in sparking international outrage (for example the TV images of the concentration camps in Bosnia Herzegovina, or footage of the Dili massacre in East Timor). They can indicate as in Long Night’s Journey into Day, television news’ ideological biases-we see archival news clips that justify the deaths of young men from the townships, by labeling them as terrorists and Communists. The documentaries indicate, too, in their very willingness to explore behind the “headlines”, the sensationalist and superficial character of most television news services. Outside television news, other moving image sources are also intercut with the testimony. This material can range through from old newsreels, through to rushes, often shot for television but that fail to make the sensationalist criteria for primetime coverage, to “home movies”. Some of the most frightening footage in Punitive Damage was material the Indonesian military taped themselves, either to record their torture techniques or to collate images of “suspects” for future reference. A third category of supporting material is the supplementary interview. All three films use additional subjects who, while they did not witness specific events, had similar experiences, or exhibit a level of expertise that strengthens the case outlined. Their presence works to corroborate the central testimony at the spine of each work.

The three documentaries-and this is something they share-chose not to critique the legal process itself. Rather, I see each documentary maker using the legal process as a device to explore the respective human rights issue. This is an interesting choice, moving the works from the role of the expositional “unbiased”, “balanced” documentary toward a role that is overtly political. The Indonesian case is not heard in Punitive Damage; the Serbian in Calling the Ghosts; nor a justification for apartheid stated within Long Night’s Journey. This could be seen as a limitation. Even a cursory sweep of legal literature indicates that there have been a number of questions raised about the legitimacy of the legal processes represented.

Various journals take on the problem of verification, with the assessment of the relative value of testimony, hearsay, documentary evidence (paperwork), and affidavit ongoing. [12]  Questions have also arisen around the use of civil law to try political crimes. [13]  Various objections are raised, one being that ultimately, these can be seen as show trials, in that there are few mechanisms for enforcing accountability. In Punitive Damage for example, we see a New Zealand woman trying an Indonesian in an American court. When he was found guilty, all three nations involved shrugged their shoulders and refused to help enforce the court’s finding.

In further legal literature, contemporary war crimes tribunals have been compared somewhat unfavourably to the Nuremberg trials which, due to the careful record keeping of the Nazis, drew on a huge pile of documentary evidence. [14] Hence, Nuremberg was able to prosecute those who devised and designed genocidal policies rather than those who enacted them. In the Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, it was initially the subordinates, those that perpetrated murder, torture, rape and other serious crimes, that were accused. Complex questions were raised about who should bear responsibility, who should shoulder the blame for grievous human rights abuses. However, recently the Tribunal, have gone after the “big fish”. Radavan Karadzic, President of the Bosnian Serbian Administration, and Ratoko Mladic, commander of the army of the Bosnian-Serbian Administration were both indicted in 1995, although they remain at large. Former President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, was indicted in 1999 with help from the United States who chose, in this instance, to exercise some financial muscle over the current Serbian administration. Milosevic faces charges relating to atrocities carried out in Kosovo in 1999, Croatia between 1991 and 1992, and to alleged genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, and is currently defending himself before the Tribunal. No doubt this trial will raise issues about the immediacy of this involvement in the crimes committed, the strength of the evidence against him and whether he, in fact, got his hands dirty. The Yugoslavian trials, too, have triggered debates over the protection of witness identities. Some argue for anonymity (given that many of these conflicts continue), while other legal scholars say this could compromise the rights of the accused. Granting anonymity, they claim, could jeopardize the credibility of such legal processes. [15]

The analysis of truth commissions has also generated legal and moral debate, mostly revolving around what to do with the “truth” when it finally emerges. [16] Whereas few, it would seem, contest the facts, the narratives of blame and responsibility differ sharply, and could ultimately be irreconcilable. Responsibility tends to be neither taken, nor enforced, particularly in regions where the military forces remain powerful and the democracies fragile. At times, it would seem nations would rather forget the past and attempt to build a future. In other instances, it is the case that justice and accountability are needed before the process of healing can begin. Further questions arise around the legal impartiality of the institutions. For example, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa has been accused of bias. There have been well-founded criticisms of ANC interference in the commission’s proceedings. [17]

Missing certainly in the legal literature (although not perhaps in the philosophical debates) is a questioning of the discursive nature of law. This does not involve just the adequacy of testimony and evidence, the inclusion of distortions or lies, or whether criminal courts can try political crimes, but rather involves a debate on the play of fiction and history. The discourse of a witness cannot be simply a reflection of his or her experience, but rather a refraction determined by the vicissitudes of memory, intention, ideology. The intentions and ideologies of the lawyers further shape questions and responses, all of which are contained within a structure determined by the conventions of law. This opacity is compounded in documentaries about legal process. Superimposed on the original trial, with its ambiguities, silences and absences, is another layer of representation, passed through the intentions of the documentary makers and, indeed, documentary form itself. Ascertaining the historical veracity of testimony inexorably re-appears as a problem.

Testimony, Politics, Truth

Documentary’s rather shaky relationship to truth, reality and history was implicitly signalled with John Grierson’s founding definition of the genre: “the creative treatment of actuality”. [18]  But it took until the mid-1980s for a fuller exploration of documentary’s problematic relationship to “reality” to emerge. Bill Nichols’ pioneering work on the subject was followed by a string of books, journals and conferences that concentrated on the documentary, much of it focusing on documentary “realism”. [19]  Documentary is seen to pose an epistemological problem through its special indexical bond with the object in the real world. Critiques of “realism” developed within various intellectual and political communities. Within feminist film studies, for example, “realism” was rejected because of its apparent slavish or easy way of representing and accessing the world. Such an approach was seen as naïve. “What the camera in fact grasps is the ‘natural’ world of the dominant ideology. Women’s cinema cannot afford such idealism; the ‘truth’ of our oppression cannot be ‘captured’ on celluloid with the ‘innocence’ of the camera”. [20]  In short, “realism” was seen as confirming patriarchal, bourgeois attitudes and ideologies because it refused to challenge dominant modes of signification.

A variant on this debate over realism and representation has occurred in the Jewish community. The obsessive return to the Shoah, generations after the event, has made the Holocaust as a documentary subject a particularly charged site. There have been convincing arguments made for why all efforts at representation including the use of metaphor are an affront to the materiality of the horror of the Holocaust. [21] And yet, as Michael Renov states, “the requirement to bear witness to the suffering and loss of life has repeatedly overruled these objections; it is, for many survivors, a compulsion.” [22]

At root, then, “realism” remains a problem, and to date, there has been less inclination to consider the positive efficacy or the popular attraction of “realism”. Yet, it has to be acknowledged that most people-and it is people surely that change things-prefer “realist” forms. I have found myself in the contradictory position as a theorist and academic, intellectually agreeing with the critique of “realism”, while at the same time, as a practitioner, choosing to work largely in the realist mode. However, recently, there have been a number of brave theoretical attempts to rehabilitate “realism” which are worth exploring further. [23]  These writers recognize that for audiences to be mobilized, they must like, identify, and engage with the images of characters seen on the film.

Jane Gaines, for example, points to a sensuous link between political documentary and its audiences in her move to revisit “realism”. [24] She applies the concept of “political mimesis” to media activism, exploring a “way of knowing” that rests on a physicality that can extend to the bodies of the spectators through emotion or sensation. “Realism”, rather than being a theoretical and intellectual problem, becomes a device that acts on politicized audiences, extending a community of resisters. I have found Gaines’ formulation particularly relevant to my argument, and would like to propose that the documentaries here perform a kind of multi-layered feminist “political mimesis” that convinces or induces belief in testimony on a more physical and emotional, rather than intellectual, level.

Gender

The proposition of a feminist political mimesis returns me to the question of gender, raised briefly at the beginning of this article. I initially thought it a coincidence that all three documentaries were made by women, and had female subjects at their centres. However, the documentaries “speak” of human rights abuses that are gendered in nature, a point worth reflecting on further.

A while back, while living in New York, I went to a talk by Jean Franco, who describes how the “narratives of struggle” had been feminized within Latin America during the 1980s. I recall that she argued that the “poet/guerilla” as a producer of discourse in that region of the world was no longer viable. The deaths had been too many, political movements too decimated. In their place had arisen the narratives of women-the testimonio as exemplified by Rigoberto Menchu, an activist for her people, the Quiche Indians of the Western Highlands of Guatemala, and the collective voices of the “mothers” movements in Argentina, Chile and elsewhere. [25]

In addition, as Franco pointed out chillingly, torture was so widespread in Latin America of the 1970s and 1980s, that the body of resistance, be it male or female, had been “feminized” through the process of torture itself, through the enforced assumption of roles of dominance and submission, the concentration on orifice, and on the frequent stream of homophobic and misogynist abuse that so often accompanies such violence. But while it is true that the “male” voice has been silenced through suffering and death, it is also the case that women, throughout the world, are most often at the forefront of the attempts at peace and reconciliation.

Of particular relevance here is the testimonio, a life story told through an “I”, the first person, by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events she or he recounts. The production of the testimonio often involves the tape recording and then transcription and editing by an interlocutor, who is an intellectual, journalist or writer. The word in Spanish suggests acts of testifying or “bearing witness” in a legal or religious sense-a story that needs to be told involving a problem of repression, poverty, subaltern status, exploitation or simply survival. The narrator must be representative in two senses: within legal, political sphere but also as part of a larger social class or group, s/he speaks in the name of the community of group, in a kind of “every day epicality”. The testimonio in fact carries out a metonymic function – it has power to stand in for the experience of the community as a whole. That is, the private history expressed always confronts the reader with larger issues of social justice. Although not exclusively a women’s genre, as Franco suggests: “It lends itself effectively to the story of conversion and conscientizacion (consciousness-raising) that occurs once women transgress the boundaries of domestic space.” [26]

It is fruitful perhaps to reflect on parallels between the feminization of political narratives and the human rights documentaries under consideration here, in particular, their similarities to the testimonio. First, Franco’s proposition that “narratives of struggle” or resistance have been feminized is indeed supported by these works, which as I pointed out earlier, are made by women, and have women at their centre. Second, the documentary subjects are indeed “bearing witness” or literally testifying in a legal sense, speaking to the particularities of women’s experience in war. In each film, too, the women are representative of a larger group, speaking in the name of the community of group, in a kind of “every-day epicality”. The debates around the testimonio, particularly around the issue of “truth” and veracity also parallel the concerns I have raised around documentary. [27]

It is here that the “mimesis” raised by Gaines would appear to have effect. Despite the intellectual problems of veracity potentially ascribed to them, I would argue that the documentaries perform a mimesis grounded in emotional identification amongst women, a mimesis that makes them effective as political texts. The process of “mimetic address” is multi-layered in these films. In Calling the Ghosts and Punitive Damage, the main witnesses, although they themselves are victims-Helen losing her child, Jadranka repeatedly raped-articulate their position clearly on behalf of other women too, they are indeed self-consciously “representative”. Their purpose in speaking out is not just to vindicate themselves and their own experiences, but because other women cannot-or will-not speak.

Helen’s opening statement in court to the Judge she makes it clear that she is not only speaking for herself, but for the Timorese whose family members were killed on November 12, 1991, the day of the Dili massacre in East Timor:

I know I’m only one individual, and I’m the only one here today. But I’m the only one who can be here without jeopardizing my own life or the life of my family. That’s why I would plead with you, when you listen to this case, that you also take into account the suffering of the other 270 families who have lost their children. [28]

And later:

Although it has been so hard on me and our family, in many ways it has been far harder on the Timorese. They can’t even go and ask what has happened to their children without being arrested, they don’t even get a body to bury – they have nowhere to light a candle . . . But what is worse even is that I know that Kamal died within half an hour or 40 minutes of being shot. Many of the young people in the cemetary that day, who disappeared, were tortured. And how you live with the knowledge that your child has been tortured . . . . and that’s what they have to live with. [29]

And Jadranka in Calling the Ghosts on women in war:

Before, when I read in the newspaper that women were suffering in the world, I took it simply as news and glanced over it. That is the feeling of guilt I carry all the time. The world watches coldly while everything passes through women’s bodies. Destroying a woman is destroying the essence of a nation. When they were killing and raping older women, they were raping and killing history, when they were raping younger women, they were destroying future generations. [30]

Helen and Jadranka then speak not only as subject/witnesses and victims, but also as representatives of a broader community of women who have suffered. They know they can represent those that cannot speak, silenced either through fear of more violence, through lack of education or through, in the case of rape, humiliation, fear of rejection, or deep religious shame. Their extraordinariness here is they are not subaltern women, in that they are highly educated and articulate, but share the experience of the suffering of the subaltern, and speak for themselves and others.

In a similar stance, a widow depicted in Long Night’s Journey into Day, readies herself at a Truth Commission hearing to confront her husband’s killer and the circumstances of his death for the first time. Nyakema Goniwe, whose husband Matthew, a teacher and activist, had been killed in the “Cradock 4” murders, begins to lose her composure. The Commissioner, recognizing her distress, prepares to call a halt to the proceedings. But she stops him, recovers her composure with dignity, and states simply: “We need a witness”. The “we” of her address is inclusive, embracing not only the other South Africans who suffered under Apartheid, but the community of viewers addressed by the documentary.

If the women in the film knowingly represent broader communities, this commitment to representation is continued by the women makers behind the production of these documentaries. Although none of us, to my knowledge, have personally experienced the conflicts described, we use our access and our craft to facilitate the voice of the subject/witnesses, who are themselves speaking on behalf of women in the “zones of danger”.

This type of documentary making is a difficult process; there is often a violent and exploitative side to the act of filming. It is necessary to deal with extremes of pain and emotion, and determining where you are permitted to delve and when you must retreat, demands understanding and trust. Jadranka, in fact, likens herself to a film-maker when describing her attempts to collect testimony:

Now I am in the role of a confessor. Without the live witness one can only speculate about the crime. The crime has not been filmed with a camera, it is only recorded in the memory of the witness. In order to expose the crime, you violate the witness. You don’t force her of course-you beg her to speak but you do make her live through it again. [31]

These layers of representation and address, amongst documentary-maker, subject/witness, community, and audience, there is a sense of a “mediated solidarity”. Without over-riding the wishes or voice of the community of women that suffer, there is a desire to do something, whatever is possible, from one’s own position. There is always, too, some recognition. The experience of women in war-rape and sexual abuse, loss of children, the inability to nuture and provide – are issues that also confront women who live in the “zones of safety”. When accused of raping Jadranka, the militia member faxed a response:

I take responsibility in claiming that there were no attempts at rape, much less that I tried to rape Jadranka Cigelj. I don’t know why I would have done that: she is 45 years old and I am 26, especially since the women in question is bad and unattractive. The way she was I would not have leaned my bicycle against her, let alone raped her. [32]

This virulent misogyny is recognizable, and not confined to war, although no doubt heightened by it. Women in most cultures are repeatedly reminded that they are to be judged by their bodies and sexuality first. Their control over their ability to reproduce is still widely contested through various state and religious dictates. And the pressure on women to nurture and feed, the domestic responsibilities that women are inevitably trained for, and generally assume, is another experience that many share. Without equating the experience of women in “safe zones” to those in war, it is not difficult for women, given their roles in most, if not all cultures, to imagine the horror of these experiences. This is where, I believe, “mimesis” can function to reach and politicize female audience members, make them care about the “misery of strangers”.

Endnotes:

[1] Punitive Damage (Annie Goldson, Occasional Productions, New Zealand 1999)
[2] Calling the Ghosts (Mandy Jacobsen, Karmen Jelincic US 1996)
[3] Long Night’s Journey into Day (Deborah Hoffman, Frances Reid, US 2000)
[4] Thomas Waugh, ed. Show Us Life: Towards a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary (Metuchen, New Jersey and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1984). Despite its age this remains the most comprehensive survey of political documentary.
[5]  Michael Ignatieff. The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and Social Conscience (London : Chatto & Windus, 1998)
[6] John Pilger’s documentary, The New Rulers of the World (U.K., 2001) looks at Suharto’s Indonesia as a blueprint for the new economic model of “globalization”. His book of the same name is being published by Verso in 2002. Also see Naomi Klein, No Logo – Taking Aim at Brand Bullies (London: Flamingo, 2000).
[7] Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, 17th August, 2000.
[8] In February 2001, the Tribunal in The Hague delivered a ruling that made mass systematic rape and sexual enslavement in a time of war a crime against humanity.
[9] Patricia Zimmermannn, States of Emergency: Documentary, Wars, Democracies (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 2000), 74.
[10] Zimmermannn, 75.
[11] Night and Fog (Alain Renais, France, 1955)
[12] Kim Carter, “Proof beyond a reasonable doubt?: collecting evidence for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia”, in The Canadian Yearbook of International Law, 1993. p. 235-263.
[13]Daniel D. Ntanda Nserko, “Rules of procedure and evidence of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia”, in Criminal Law Reform, 507-555.
[14] Richard May and Marikek Wierda, “Trends in international criminal evidence: Nuremberg, Tokyo, The Hague, and Arusha” in Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 37:725 (1999): 727-765.
[15] Francoise J. Hampson, “The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the reluctant witness” in International and Comparative Law Quarterly, (1998): 50-74.
[16] Priscilla B. Hayner, “Fifteen truth commissions 1974 to 1994: a comparative study, in Human Rights Quarterly, 16, (1994): 599-655.
[17] Anthea Jeffrey, The Truth about the Truth Commission (South African Institute of Race Relations, 1999)
[18] John Grierson quoted in Paul Rotha, Documentary Film 2nd edn. (London: Faber , 1952), 70.
[19]Bill Nichols, “The voice of documentary” in Movies and Methods, Vol. 1, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). See also his Representing Reality. (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991) and the Visible Evidence series, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press).
[20] Claire Johnston, “Women’s cinema as counter-cinema” in Movies and Methods, Vol. 1, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 214.
[21] Alvin Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature, as quoted in Michael Renov, “Historical discourses of the unimaginable: Peter Forgacs’ The Maelstrom” in forthcoming collection, Past Time: Peter Forgacs’ Archeological Cinema, ed. Bill Nichols and Michael Renov. See also Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York and London: Routledge), 1992.
[22] Michael Renov, Historical Discourses (forthcoming)
[23] See Alex Juhasz, “They said we were trying to show reality – all I want to show is my video” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999)190-215.
[24] Jane Gaines, “Political mimesis” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999), 84-102.
[25] Elizabeth Burgos, interlocutor, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (Barcelona : Seix Barral, 1993).
[26] Jean Franco, “Going public: reinhabiting the private”, in Critical Passions: Selected Essays (Minneapolis and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 53.
[27] For debates on the testimonio, see The Rigoberta Menchu Controversy, ed. Arturo Arias (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2001).
[28] From Punitive Damage
[29] From Punitive Damage
[30] From Calling the Ghosts
[31] From Calling the Ghosts
[32] From Calling the Ghosts