Lisa
Kois’s Film The Art Of Forgetting – Review
By Prasanna Ratnayake
29 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org
During
this year’s Vesak week in Sri Lanka, Buddhists celebrated the
birth, life and death of their Lord. Principles were recalled: that
it is a bad thing to drink alcohol, to eat meat or fish, to commit any
crime against living beings. However, there were no messages about the
protection of human life, or references to the principle of ahimsa for
people; revealing a curious absence of concern or interest in the humanitarian
disaster raging in the country. The last few months of undeclared war
in the North and East have generated 300,000 IDPs (Internally Displaced
Persons) and, according to reports by human rights organisations, more
than 4,000 people have been abducted and killed; while in the South
families receive the bodies of their dead soldiers. These figures are
escalating daily. There is no Vesak message for these people, a strange
anomaly for this aggressively Buddhist state and predominantly Buddhist
society.
Considering this Vesak ceremony
of denial, it is sobering to watch Lisa Kois’s Art of Forgetting
which covers the past thirty years of brutal civil wars and assassinations
in the North, East and South of Sri Lanka. The subject of this documentary
is the impact and scale of human suffering for people caught in the
clash between those demanding a motherland and those defending a motherland.
The absence of any vision or concern for the overall sanity of the country
is due to the fact that civil society has no institutions capable of
contributing to resolution of this conflict.
Lisa’s use of Albert
Camus’s phrase the art of forgetting as her title epitomises the
experience of these dark decades in Sri Lanka’s history. During
this time, Sinhala Buddhists have characterised their nation as Free,
Beautiful and Triumphant. But the reality is light years away from these
fabrications. The sheer weight of endless disasters has encouraged widespread
amnesia, compounded by the difficulty of determining what is real and
what is myth in the highly charged sectarian and bigoted atmosphere.
As a consequence, many people have lost the ability to remember accurately
or interpret the past and have become experts in forgetting their own
and their compatriots’ sufferings, usually in a matter of weeks.
Nonetheless, one day the traumatic collective memories of these times
will emerge to challenge the brutal system that destroyed lives, values,
a sense of a future and the sanity of a nation.
Lisa constructs her film
as a journey from the North to the South of the country, travelling
along the one road that unites the country, the A9, which was opened
after the 2002 ceasefire. She meets people from all sides who have been
affected by the catastrophe and manages to convey their innocence and
helplessness. Beyond the suffering they have experienced Lisa is interested
in their courage and resilience, their determination to survive with
whatever dignity they can under dreadful circumstances. This is revealed
in the small things they have rescued from their personal tragedies:
the cheerful camaraderie of a murdered schoolgirl’s friends; the
laughter with which a man displays a mortar he has been saving as a
souvenir; the poignant account of his torture by an ex-Buddhist monk;
a young woman’s memories of her murdered student leader boyfriend;
and the smile on the face of a young Tamil girl in her white school
uniform, whose hopes echo the same timid optimism that each generation
over these decades has clung to and then lost.
But Lisa does not only see
the desolation of the people. She also shows the hopeless state of ravaged
buildings, the small shrines in the derelict, bombed out remains of
once revered temples and the debris of normal domestic life, shoes,
pots and pans, scraps of clothing.
Lisa’s techniques include
soft focus frames, voices off, rapid editing and devastating detail;
such as the bullet-pocked house in Jaffna with Sinhalese graffiti expressing
the frustrations of the occupying soldiers; elsewhere Tamil graffiti
encouraging the devastated local people to stay true to their struggle
for liberation. In all places, on every side, the distraught tears of
mothers. Even the music Lisa chooses for her soundtrack adds emotional,
sensitive, sometimes ironic dimensions to her evocation of the country’s
complex tragedy.
The significance of this
film lies in the way it manages to capture so many facets of Sri Lanka’s
past thirty years of riots, disappearances, assassinations and wars,
declared and undeclared, in a semiotics of prejudice. The Sinhala majority,
in its extraordinary denial, constantly tries to bury this history and
the current tragic situation, whether in chauvinist cultural events
or in the expectation recently that a win by the cricket team will demonstrate
the moral superiority of the nation. Meanwhile, a huge campaign of state-managed
propaganda promotes war and makes bigoted politicians celebrities of
slaughter. Similar bombastic claims are made by all sides.
This film represents a serious
contribution and a challenge to the previous practices of Sri Lankan
documentary filmmakers. As Brecht found in 1934, the struggle to rescue
reality from propaganda demands: ‘the courage to write the truth
although it is being suppressed; the intelligence to recognise it, although
it is being covered up; the judgement to choose those in whose hands
it becomes effective; the cunning to spread it among them.’
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