INTERFACE

REVIEW

War and Peace 07

Stroud Subscription Rooms
20 June

Reviewed by: Colin Glen »

Conflict has been on my mind a lot recently. Even in the chip shop getting my kids meals just before Fiona Kam Meadley’s screening of films on the theme of conflict and conciliation, I couldn’t help overhearing the details of a domestic fight: “..and then she grabbed a scalpel and stabbed him in the arm!..”.

Overheard conversations in the builders’ merchant, the café and on the street also seemed to point to a level of debate about how and why violence occurs. The problem is that we just don’t know.

Down in the little back café of Stroud’s Subscription Rooms – transformed for the night into a cinema – I read in the programme that the ‘War and Peace’ event was aimed specifically at bringing such issues to the fore and to create an environment not only for reflection and discussion, but also in the hope of finding ways to “construct peace”. The beautifully curated evening’s screenings took as a starting point the question posed to Kam Meadley by her eight-year-old son; “Why do people fight?”, to which she had no answer. So she made the documentary Testimony from Liberia with her husband, John Meadley, a development worker in war-scarred regions. The footage consists of one woman’s account of her journey as a hostage at the hands of the rebel militia, along with scores of orphaned children. At the end of the documentary there is a poignant moment as, from behind the camera, John Meadley tentatively approaches the Malaysian UN peacekeeping soldiers and strikes up a conversation on the subject of cricket. His trepidation underlined the fact that UN soldiers still need to be trained to kill to be able to defend peace, raising the issue that conflict can be seen as defence, the protection of territory, either land, power, religious or even, in the ‘War and Peace’ session’s context of the Site07 festival, value systems that surround the artwork. An image flashed into my mind of the previous year’s ‘War and Peace’ event as part of Site06, when the collective read out The Bill of Human Rights at the 17th Century Quaker Meeting House in the small south Cotswold town of Nailsworth.

The attempt to see into the mind of the soldier was also the subject of two films that introduced the evening. Army by Louise Burston presents an archive of personal photographs of Second World War soldiers from Northern Greece. The display of youthful confidence shown in gestures like sitting astride an anti-tank gun, fades into a melancholic, almost naïve display of hope which also speaks of friendship and camaraderie of war. Sean Taylor’s 100 Paces shows the other side of the soldier; the relentless drilling, the ‘square bashing’ that one ex-soldier in the ‘War and Peace’ audience said was designed to eradicate the question “Why?”, a question for which he had been court marshalled three times. Taylor’s piece is a sophisticated study which, in choreographing the soldiers into drill routines whilst singing songs based on the Irish national anthem and UN peacekeeping missions, reveals how interwoven beliefs systems such as nationality and folklore are forming the ideology of a soldier; The ultimate manifestation of these beliefs is that the body can be trained to be a tool of destruction.

Fern Thomas’s Creation Stories, a series of unflinching physical gestures made direct to camera, echoed early performance work such as that of Bruce Nauman or Robert Morris, and yet powerfully portrayed the inseparable union between violence and creativity in basic actions of body. The slowed down footage of clapping hands, dropping a rock or throwing mud at the wall, all pretty innocuous acts in themselves, provoked horror and rapt fascination as slowing down the footage made each act sound like an explosion. The final metaphorical gesture of blowing flour from cupped hands at the camera was particularly successful, as the thundering sound was accompanied by a visual explosion ominously reminiscent of the white-out of a nuclear blast. This dovetailed seamlessly with Fern Thomas’s 00:00:45, a series of flashed-up negative stills taken by a Japanese soldier in the months after the devastation at Hiroshima, forty-five seconds being the time it took for the atomic bomb ‘Little Boy’ to detonate.

Cabinet, a film by Tim Shore is a superbly crafted conceptual musing on the intellectual mindset of the American ‘Unabomber’ Theodore John Kaczynki, who had his manifesto against technological civilisation published in the Washington Post in 1995. The letter-bomber had retreated to the idyllic wilderness of Montana to advance his campaign. The film provoked an interesting discussion after the ‘War and Peace’ event which began with the painter Carolyn White saying that peace was not portrayed as much as war. The chief executive of Peace Direct, Carolyn Hayman, replied with another question; what constitutes an image of peace? Filmmaker Louisa Fairclough suggested that process-based art was more suited to representing peace activity than symbolic still images. As the discussion continued, my mind drifted back to the landscape paintings that I had seen a couple of days previously in Kel Portman’s ‘Walking the Land’ exhibition in the town centre. So many artists move to rural locations to be absorbed by them, to find a sense of peace in nature, Yet as Dominic Thomas’ incisive piece in the exhibition, Untitled (Land/Money/Power) displayed, landscape is a contested place. His simple labelling of three of Britain’s largest country estates as artworks (title, medium, dimensions, price) made me look at the assortment of landscape images with which he shared company, begging the question; who owns that land in that picture?

I was to come across another work by Thomas a few days after ‘War and Peace’, at Louisa Fairclough’s ‘Place Memory’ screenings held at the recently refurbished Stroud Valleys Artspace. With haunting echoes of Tim Shore’s Cabinet, Retreat explores the desire to return to an innocent past in an innocent nature. We follow Thomas as hikes awkwardly through the romantic countryside of the Lake District towards a tumbledown cottage where he spent holidays as a child. Thomas barely enters the cottage before retracing his steps, this time walking backwards. It gradually dawns that the journey we saw of him going up the hill was achieved by reversing original footage of him walking backwards down the hill. The work is a complex and masterful illumination on the hope of finding peace through travel, in both one’s memory to a place of the past and literally, absorbed into a landscape bereft of people.

It was however, the travelling in hope to a populated place, portrayed by Claire Fowler’s documentary Jamal’s Journey, which I found the most thought provoking work in the ‘War and Peace’ programme. The audience was led through the contested territory of the Middle East on the tortuous journey of a nine-month-old little boy from West Bank Palestine to a life saving operation in a Jerusalem hospital. The audience audibly held their collective breath when a power cut interrupted heart surgery operation. Only the calm voice of the doctor punctuated the darkness both of the hospital the space on screen and in the little room at the Sub Rooms, reassuring that the operation could continue if a torch could be found. Thankfully the electricity returned, the operation was a success and Jamal returned home to the palpable relief of his family. Palpable relief was also the feeling here at ‘War and Peace’. In fact the collective experience of the journey of hope proved to be the result of the environment created for the screenings, evidence of the fact that peace is something that has to be constructed, made out of communication.

War and Peace 07 toured to Watershed/Arnolfini cinema, Bristol, 25 July, The Big Green Gathering, Somerset, 1-5 August and continues to Bath Film Festival, November

Writer detail:
I am an artist and am studying for a Phd at the University of Bristol in the photographic documentation of art

Venue detail:
Subscription Rooms »
Stroud District Council, George Street, STROUD GL5 1AE

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