Scuppered

		Scuppered Of Fish and Film Alan Wright

At bottom, documentary has always been a fishy business. The credibility, veracity and authenticity of the documentary image is grounded on its status as factual record, its value as truthful evidence, its role as objective witness. Yet any attempt to assert the identity of reality and representation in documentary film proves a slippery notion at best. Think of Nanook, capering like Charlie Chaplin, as he hauls a large seal through a hole in the ice. The seal was already dead and a crew of helpers, positioned just off camera, vigorously tugged Nanook this way and that on the end of his line. Flaherty shoots a walrus hunt that follows the traditional method of capturing and killing the prey. The hunters were more likely to finish off the job with a bullet than a harpoon, and appealed to the filmmaker to put down his camera and pick up a rifle. The history of documentary film contains numerous examples and anecdotes like these which show that every document is also and always a fiction. The facts are not available without a detour through fantasy.

Artur, Boris and Oleg held tremendous faith in the power of documents to tell the truth. The sailors’ appeal for justice was somehow bound up with finding the right words, in justifying themselves, precisely. Ledgers, letters, contracts, memos, reports, legal briefs and judgments, laws. Dates, times, facts and figures. They produced the log books of the ships which recorded in miniscule detail the hours on duty and the pay due to the sailors. Piles and piles of files, paper bags full of paper. Pages written in Russian and in English. What did it all mean? Who could possibly understand the ins and outs of this story? At some point, the effort to communicate the facts of the matter took on a desperate and absurd cast. The events began to assume the quality of a fantastic tale by Nikolai Gogol. In “How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich” a brown pig races into the courtroom and steals the petition: “this extraordinary occurrence provoked a terrible rumpus because no copy had been made of the abducted document.” The judge decides that the only thing to do is to make another report of the incident.

Why have there been so many documentaries about fish and fishermen? John Grierson’s first film, Drifters (1929), establishes the tradition by filming a routine voyage of the British herring fleet. Grierson saw documentary as the most advanced front in the ‘battle for authenticity’. Cinema should be useful. It should tell the truth, not create illusions. Documentary was primarily a means of redirecting the focus of film toward a more direct representation of human experience and action. Grierson prescribed a strong dose of realism as an antidote to the false and fabricated spectacles produced in the big studios of Hollywood . Jean-Luc Godard, referring apparently to a saying of D.W. Griffith, has reduced the history of cinema to a simple formula: Film = a Girl and a Gun. In these terms, documentary could be characterised as a film about men and fish.

In The Last Bolshevik (1992), Chris Marker offers another way of thinking about cinema’s responsibility to reality. In a letter to Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, the narrator trots out the well worn cliché: ‘Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, you feed him for life’. He then concludes that ‘the Soviets gave the people cinema, not films’. Cinema, according to this view, maintains a commitment to a secular politics of the image: to preserve and project the socialist vision of a human community. A roll of film promises a more immediate and accurate response to the victims of History than the loaves and fishes dispensed by Jesus Christ. It’s not too much of a logical leap to contend, therefore, that documentary film holds a particular obligation to provide a measure of social justice to its subjects. The fish, as well as acting as a pungent reminder of material reality, also functions, in this case, as a conceptual object. It represents an idea in the form of an image: Ίχθυς. The history of cinema can also be read as a fish story: an ichthyology of film, where the Christian symbol translates into the injunction to film truth at 24 frames per second. The scales of justice are held by an old fishwife: in one pan, a stack of film cans, in the other, a heap of hoki, orange roughie, snapper.

Karelrybflot is a Russian shipping company. From 1995 until early 1998, five fishing vessels which it owned were operated (and I am using the expression loosely) in New Zealand waters by Abel Fisheries Ltd under a charter agreement. The vessels were seized by the Crown after committing significant quota offences. Abel was prosecuted and later went into receivership. In the meantime, the ships were released on bond and continued to be fished.

The vessels were crewed by Russian seamen, none of whom were implicated in the ongoing criminal proceedings. From the 1^st of October 1997, the men were not paid. Karelrybflot denied it was their employer but promised to pay what was owed once the men returned to Russia, despite denying at all times any actual liability in respect of wages. It claimed Abel was responsible under the contract. An atmosphere of major distrust developed between the company and the sailors. By February of 1998, they were, understandably, extremely restive. During this time, Abel pled guilty and the ships passed back into government hands. Karelrybflot immediately terminated the contracts. The men occupied the vessels, refusing to leave them or New Zealand until they were paid. By March 1998, they were in what could be regarded untechnically as a state of mutiny. Approximately 90 of the crew commenced court proceedings against the company under New Zealand law.

The plight of the men (for plight it soon became) was a matter of considerable media interest and attention, and, indeed, public concern in Christchurch and New Zealand.

1. Michael Taussig, ‘The Beach (a Fantasy)’, in Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press , 2006), p. 98.

The familiar figure of the old salts in Drifters and Granton Trawler (1934), the man joking with a boy as he casts his net in Song of Ceylon (1934), the four fishermen who set sail on a raft to protest the loss their livelihood in It’s All True (1942), the fishermen in Pour la suite du monde (1962) who revive the old practice for capturing a beluga whale, have long since faded from the screen. The heroes of these historical documentaries embodied an ideal of Labour, of work as an ethical and political category. Their absence roughly coincides with what Michael Taussig refers to as ‘the disappearance of the sea’. (1) As modernity moves beyond the industrial phase, the sea retreats from the horizon of experience: ‘The conduct of life today is utterly dependent on the sea and the ships it bears, yet nothing is more invisible’. Taussig continues: ‘Today the ports of wood or stone are either no longer used or have been demolished. Concrete container terminals have replaced them in moonscaped industrial sites far from the people who go as tourists to the gentrified old ports where sailing ships are resurrected as museums’. In the popular imagination, the sea, or rather the narrow coastal strip along its shore, supplies the backdrop for pleasure and leisure. Marinas, aquariums, shops, restaurants and cafés line the wharves; yachts, ferries and cruise boats take their passengers to swim with the dolphins or watch whales. There’s nary a sailor or a seagoing vessel in sight!

Property values have soared in Lyttelton recently. Everyone wants a view of the harbour. Old villas and workers cottages are being done up. The township has become a desirable location for young families, professionals and artistic types. A Farmers Market and a number of fine cafes cater to the taste for good coffee and organic produce. The nightlife is interesting. There’s a great selection of DVDs at the local VideoEzy.

Trucks still rumble down Norwich Quay. The port is noisy and smells of fumes from the petroleum tankers. For years now the public has been denied access to the Port except on open day. It’s no longer possible to fish from the wharves or stroll along the waterfront. There’s still more than a few rough looking customers in the pubs near the harbour. The Korean karaoke bar keeps mysterious hours. And, when they’re in town, bands of Russians walk up and down the main street, eating ice cream in all weathers, huddling around phone booths, drinking vodka in the reserve at Magazine Bay.

2. Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag/Rotterdam: Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, 1995), p. 50.

Taussig draws upon Allan Sekula’s remarkable analysis of global capitalism and the economic, political and cultural transformation of maritime space. Against the flows of electronic information that power the virtual circuits of exchange which sustain the world economy, Sekula insists upon the material conditions themselves which permit the international traffic in commodities. He is ‘arguing for the continued importance of maritime space in order to counter the exaggerated [significance] attached to that largely metaphysical construct, cyberspace, and the corollary myth of “instantaneous” contact between distant spaces. Much of what we buy and consume has been shipped across the oceans as heavy-duty cargo. The container ship looks more like a huge floating factory than a seafaring craft. For all its monstrous bulk, the contents of its cargo and the composition of its crew – Filipinos, Koreans, Mexicans, Sri Lankans, Russians and Ukrainians, the flotsam and jetsam of a globalised economy – remain largely invisible and anonymous. It carries the coffins of dead labour around the globe, stacked high on deck or packed into the hull like the rows of canned goods in a supermarket. The containerised vessel is a modernised version of the vampire’s ship in Murnau’s or Herzog’s Nosferatu (1922/1979). Unnoticed, unseen, it reaches the terminus and unloads its deadly freight: the dark secret of globalisation and the free market. Once in dock, the automated port obliterates all sense of the elemental nature or the physical labour that produced the manufactured objects sealed in the containers: ‘Goods that once reeked – guano, gypsum, steamed tuna, hemp, molassess – now flow or are boxed. The boxes, viewed in vertical elevation, have the proportions of slightly elongated banknotes’. (2) The smell of fish no longer taints the port. The radical protest of wharfies and sailors no longer threatens to disrupt the smooth functioning of the social, economic and political system. Nothing but the silent hum of the abstract machinery of capital.

3. Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics (London & New York: Verso, 1995), pp. 1-2.

Jacques Rancière claims that democracy as practised in the agora, the forum, in the assembly – Duma or Beehive alike – must turn its back on the sea. Politics must ‘be hauled on to dry land, set down on terra firma’ in order ‘to shield [it] from the perils that are immanent to it’. Waves of sedition arise from the port: ‘The tang of brine is always too close’. In the name of the law, the people must be protected from the threat to the sovereign rule of the Republic: ‘The great beast of the populace ... can be represented as a trireme of drunken sailors’. (3) And we know what to do with them ... Put ‘em in the scuppers with a hosepipe on them!

4. Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore & London : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 157.

The standard phrases used to describe the plight of the 100 Russian sailors who occupied the ships – marooned, shipwrecked, stranded, mutiny – failed to account for the strange fascination exercised by the presence of the vessels. The familiar reference points of time and place had been somehow altered. Every morning, the view from my window looked the same, yet, off to the left, the rusting hulks sat there, staring back, a disturbing reminder of something left over, something left out.

One must return to Marker for an image that does justice to the mise en abîme structure of the event that unfolded in Lyttelton Harbour. Sunless (1982) contains an image which fulfils Mitchell’s recommendation to present conceptual ideas in concrete form: an emu calmly strolls through a French park on an autumn day. Its incongruous presence creates a disturbance in the apprehension of time and place. Its quizzical appearance in such a foreign setting provokes an experience of displacement and discontinuity. The primeval aura which surrounds the Australian continent settles over the cultivated wildness of a French pleasure garden. The image of the emu connects the familiar with the unfamiliar, to borrow a phrase from Dame Edna, in a ‘spooky’ circuit of exchange. Emus dwell in the Île de France in the same fashion as the spectre that, as heralded by The Communist Manifesto, haunts Europe.

Marker registers the encounter as a premonitory glimpse of a temporal dimension -- dislocated, disjunct, discontinuous -- which confounds the standard vision of historical time as chronological and homogeneous. Just before the emu appears, the narrator claims that ‘in the nineteenth century mankind had come to terms with space and that the great problem of the twentieth century was the coexistence of different concepts of time’. Marker has found a poetic method for documenting the imprint of a history touched by the memory of a lost experience of time. As a conceptual figure, the image of the emu conducts a spectral relay of communication. An absence animates the present. An object occupies an Other’s place. An event occurs in a virtual space and time. The past remains implicated in the present, the present complicated by the coincidental passage of a parallel time-zone. An untimely apparition emerges in the ghostly interval that opens in their wake.

There’s a scene in Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) where the main character returns to her childhood home, the site of a traumatic memory of sexual abuse and murder. At the end of the street, a gigantic ship looms up, blocking the horizon. Slavoj Žižek refers to this image as the Return of the Real. Everything safe, solid and secure about the world that Marnie has constructed founders beneath the dead weight of the monstrous vessel. The O boats, as the ships came to be known in Lyttelton, were freighted with a similar secret. But rather than recall a personal catastrophe, they announced a crisis in historical time. Indeed, one dark night, I swore I saw a vision of Battleship Potemkin sailing into port next to Captain Cook’s Endeavour.

The other cinematic image that the Russian ships dredged up was, of course, from Battleship Potemkin (1925). Eisenstein used the story of the sailors’ rebellion as a means of representing the historical inevitability of the Russian Revolution. The myth has come to substitute for the reality. ‘Where does the Potemkin go’, asks Gilberto Perez, ‘now that the 1917 revolution has itself ended in failure?’ (4) The mutinous sailors sought refuge in Constanţa , a Rumanian port on the Black Sea . Their free passage through the czarist blockade was a momentary triumph of solidarity. Eisenstein warns that ‘the bourgeoisie is a great expert in smoothing over the critical questions of the present day which are so brilliantly resolved by the philosophy of “happy endings”’. He defends the lyricism and pathos of Battleship Potemkin, and by implication its happy ending, by asserting that the film ‘dismember[s] and reassemble[s]’ the elements of bourgeois art. Accordingly:

5. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘ Constanţa (Whither The Battleship Potemkin)’, in Selected Works, Vol 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 157.

In the light of revolutionary consciousness, the maximum conceivable in the circumstances, making the Potemkin (the moral victor over the guns of tzarism) into the occasion for an anecdote, albeit a sublime and tragic one, about a ‘wandering ship’ is, however, to demean the significance of this event ... We stop the event at this point where it had become an ‘asset’ of the Revolution. But the agony goes on. (5)

Yet the cinematic image remains after the historical reality has ceased to exist. Where has the Potemkin gone? In the very last shot, the prow of the ship splits the screen like a wedge as it steams toward the viewer. Many years later, the ghost ship still haunts the memory. Perez suggests that the final image ‘sweeps over the audience’ and anchors itself in their hearts and minds. Potemkin sets sails on a voyage to utopia.

Giorgio Agamben recognises that the revolution demands a poetics of time that is equal to its political task:

6. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum’, in Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (London: Verso, 1993), p. 91.

Even historical materialism has until now neglected to elaborate a concept of time that compares with its concept of history. Because of this omission it has been unwittingly compelled to have recourse to a concept of time dominant in Western culture for centuries, and so to harbour, side by side, a revolutionary concept of history and a traditional experience of time. (6)

Shock provides the medium for exploding the continuum of history. The abysmal experience of a shift in the contours of time and place produces an effect of conceptual vertigo and cognitive dissonance. Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image inaugurates a temporality of disjuncture and discontinuity. But pleasure, as Agamben maintains, also supplies the locus for establishing the ‘qualitative alteration of time’ implicitly announced in Benjamin’s philosophy of history. The panicky flurry which so drastically undermines the rigour and gravity of rational thought gives way to a mild flutter of disbelief, eventually furthering the enjoyment of a confused but novel sense of liberation from the categories of logic and meaning that encourages a dubious critical method, alive to the uncertainties and vagaries of reference and representation.

Scuppered stays with the last image from Battleship Potemkin until the very end. The screen splits and parts like a final curtain and then those fatal words appear: КОНЕЦ. Scuppered is a story about the much-fabled end of history, the end of politics – the end, as Jacques Rancière puts it, of the promise:

7. On the Shores of Politics, p. 5.

For the original evil was the promise itself: the gesture which propels the telos of community ... Politics was now going renounce its long complicity with ideas of future times and other places. It would now end as a secret voyage to the isles of utopia, and henceforth view itself as the art of steering the ship and embracing the waves, in the natural, peaceful movement of growth ... (7)

At the end of the twentieth century, Potemkin finally ran aground in Lyttelton Harbour. The troika of Russian fishing boats had lost their bearings as they navigated a Northwest Passage through the shoals of time. The ghosts of the past which haunt Post-Soviet Russia and New Zealand, a client state of the free market – Communism and Colonialism, Revolution and Rogernomics – return in the breach opened as they crossed the bar of History.

Rancière insists that the end of a particular period of time sealed by the promise clears the way for a space freed of all checks and balances:

8. Ibid, p. 6.

This space is ‘the Centre’ – meaning not one area that is central relative to all others, but, rather, generically, a new configuration of political space, the free development of a consensual force adequate to the free and apolitical development of production and circulation. (8)

In other words: ‘Don’t rock the boat!’ The Russian sailors had survived the fall of Communism only to be cast away in a backwater of the globalised economy. Their existence created a minor embarrassment for the various government agencies and authorities who became involved in managing the dispute. The public rallied around the abandoned seamen with sympathy and support, but the Russians had strayed into uncharted waters beyond the protection of state or society. The men occupied their ships for sixteen months, refusing to leave until they received their wages. The boats became a prison. The sailors had joined the ranks of a floating population of people without rights, without a claim to justice, without a stake in the polis. Human Cargo. Detainees, Refugees. Illegal Aliens. Asylum Seekers. Political Prisoners. Victims of Natural Disasters and War Crimes. New Zealand imagines itself as a haven from the War on Terror but the Russians on the boats were treated more like hostages than foreign workers who just wanted to get paid. The heroic gesture of their comrades on Battleship Potemkin now looks like a futile joke.

To obtain Alan Wright’s video Scuppered (New Zealand, 2005), see contact details at http://www.drama.canterbury.ac.nz/people/wright.shtml. Several clips can be viewed on YouTube.

		© Alan Wright and Rouge October 2008. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.