Laura Waddington

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Still

France, 2009, 7 min. 15 sec. Mini DV, Colour, Stereo
Conceived and Edited: Laura Waddington
For the collective French film project Outrage & Rebellion initiated by Nicole Brenez and Nathalie Hubert
Images: Anonymous images, downloaded from the internet
Premiere: Streamed as part of Outrage & Rebellion on Mediapart.fr, January 20–June 15, 2010 [Outrage & Rebellion was initially published, one film per day, from December 10, 2009—February 10, 2010, with some films later extended.]

If you are the creator of any of the anonymous images used and would like them removed, or to be attributed, please get in touch.

Synopsis

Still is a short video made in a few weeks for Outrage & Rebellion, a collective film protesting police violence in France. The project was initiated by Nicole Brenez and Nathalie Hubert, in response to the blinding of filmmaker Joachim Gatti in one eye, when a police officer fired a flash-ball into a group of peaceful protestors in Montreuil in July 2009. It was first published on the website of the online newspaper Mediapart on December 10, 2009, with a new part released each day, and remained accessible for several months.

Director’s statement

Still was made for Outrage & Rebellion a collective french film to protest against police violence in France, initiated and produced by Nicole Brenez and Nathalie Hubert, after the filmmaker Joachim Gatti lost his eye, when a policeman shot him with a flash-ball in July 2009.

The idea of the project was for each filmmaker to make their contribution without a budget and within a few weeks. I worked with images of police brutality that I found on the internet, often taken by family and friends of the victims. I sampled the soundtrack from Santiago Alvarez’s Now! My video made in memory of him

I wanted to draw attention to the “climate of impunity” within the French police force, described by Amnesty International. More and more, people who complained or spoke out about police violence were being charged with defamation or “outrage et rébellion.” This applied to some journalists documenting the violence too.

RESOURCE TO ACCOMPANY THE PUBLICATION OF STILL ON MEDIAPART

… I wanted these passages of white, accompanied by the sound of machine guns, to represent the absence of images and information; the vacuum into which, I believe, decades of obscuring information has thrown French society and which to me is also a kind of blinding. What exists behind the white? How many deaths do we not know about? How many cases of mistreatment are not recorded because the victims were silenced or charged with “Outrage & Rebellion”?

Read writing with links: Notes on Still and Police Violence in France

Press Quotes

“In Still, she reminds us of the victims of police violence in France—once again, invisible characters without a voice, represented only through this exercise of found footage, images encountered on the Internet … The urgency of Still is expressed in its pixelated images, which serve as the unique testimony of people like Joachim Gatti, a victim of a flash-ball that caused the loss of his eye, and of tens of men and children whose lives were snatched away by police violence … The soundscape is filled with the sounds of machine guns, which punctuate this montage of human misery, exposing the intention to render these lives invisible.”

José Sarmiento Hinojosa, Desistfilm Online Film Journal, Lima

Read article: Panorama: Tres cortometrajes de Laura Waddington (Spanish original)

“Top Ten Films of 2009: Material – Thomas Heise, Gran Torino – Clint Eastwood, Le streghe – Jean-Marie Straub, 36 vues du pic Saint Loup – Jacques Rivette, Mary & Max – Adam Elliott, Waterfront Follies – Ernie Gehr, Vincere – Marco Bellocchio, Still – Laura Waddington, Répons – Marylène Negro, Double Take – Johan Grimonprez”

Federico Rossin for Il Manifesto, Rome (Best Films of 2009 Poll)

“The filmmaker’s work interweaves the following three main concerns:
—the testing of the latest industrial audiovisual technologies to challenge her own gaze. In this way, her radical experimentation with mini-DV should be seen as an extension of her work begun in the early 1990s: a spy camera sewn into her jacket and controlled by her body in Zone (1995), during a cruise on the QE2; the fifteen Hi8 recordings that she requested over the internet from acquaintances around the world to create The Lost Days (1999); or the images of police violence that she downloaded from the internet to make Still (2009). Technology can then enter into resonance with her two other concerns:
—Resilience and systematic disobedience in the face of the obstacles imposed by anti-immigration policies and the dismantling of the rights of asylum.
—Sustained attention “to those whom society doesn’t care or dare to see, people waiting in limbo and at borders because they do not fit the dominant political narrative or our current economic needs.””

Bidhan Jacobs, Esthétique du signal: Hacker le filmique, Éditions Mimésis, Milan

“Laura Waddington’s … intense, melancholy films represent simultaneous practical, aesthetic, and existential experiments. Her work involves inventing new devices of depiction (Zone, 1995, The Lost Days, 1999) and empathetically exploring, sometimes for years, precise, obscure, disenfranchised, and threatened sites of human reality (Cargo, 2001, Border, 2004). … We also owe her for coming up with the title Outrage & Rebellion.”

Nicole Brenez, Introduction to Still on Mediapart

More Press Quotes

On my interest in WORKING WITH images uploaded to the internet, AT THe TIME

“Does the arrival of a new technology—photography, small video cameras, the Internet, smart phones —completely transform a society? Or at moments in history, do events in the making, call out for and conjure into being the new tools needed to document them—the old forms no longer able to seize them, suddenly rendered redundant, until one day, no longer relied upon, they may be re-visited in a completely fresh way?” (Waddington, Scattered Truth)

The question posed by Waddington regarding the use of new technologies directly interrogates the ways in which photography, mini video cameras, the internet and smartphones have transformed society; namely, a subversion of the relationship between image and event is taking place, to the point that the latter requires new forms and new techniques of documentation … Thus, the new media of high definition, ends up being defined as a reinforcement of certain and deliberate narratives, leaving no room for doubt and expectation, fundamental elements in the process of the authentication of the image … Laura Waddington’s … documentaries … lend themselves to an investigation of relationships between new and obsolete technologies, between the quality of the image and meanings that are produced.

Cecilia Bima, Lacune visive: Bassa definizione per un’etica della testimonianzaRead chapter: Bassa definizione e immagine testimoniale: la lacuna visiva come strategia di autenticazione (English translation)

“To put it succinctly, four important kinds of initiatives can be located on the Internet: images of counter-information … essays and critical overviews, some of them brilliant, heirs to the writing of Chris Marker … the immemorial and indispensable tradition of revolutionary songs and videos … and the development of hapax, of completely unique forms following the example of the films of Laura Waddington, Marylène Negro, or Florent Marcie’s Saïa … This fourth aspect remains largely unexplored, and it would require a collective effort to identify, comment on, and conserve the memory of these films.”

Nicole Brenez interviewed by Donal Foreman, L’art le plus politique, The Brooklyn Rail, New York

PROLOGUE: ON THE POLICE TORCHLIGHT AT THE END OF STILL

“[During the filming of Border] the police often temporarily blinded the exiles with their torches, the glare so powerful that Waddington’s equipment retained the traces: some of the pixels in her mini-DV camera were damaged. (Waddington had to duplicate the pixels neighbouring the missing ones during editing. She also used these shots of violent overexposure in her film Still.) In this way, the extreme physical and psychological violence permanently inflicted on the exiles—and which the filmmaker recounts in her moving voice-over [in Border] but never shows—erupts through this slow shutter speed. These men, women, and children, driven to the border, humiliated, hunted down, martyred at Sangatte, mutilated, or killed in accidents during the dangerous crossings of the tunnel, are depicted through this eruptive vibration, reflecting the crimes suffered, which they will keep silent about forever.”

Bidhan Jacobs, Esthétique du signal: Hacker le filmique, Éditions Mimésis, Milan

I recorded this shot—the only footage in Still filmed by me—in Calais in December 2002, following the closure of the Red Cross camp at Sangatte. It was taken moments after protesting Iraqi and Kurdish refugees were forcibly removed from the Place du Maréchal Foch by French riot officers; I wanted to film the faces of the men responsible. I also used their blinding torchlight to create the intermittent flashes of white light that punctuate Still.

Selected Screenings

Read Full Screenings and Exhibition List for Still

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