By Haim Bresheeth

“…That’s not the way the world really works any more; We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality, and while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

A George W Bush Aide (1)

Background to production
I had wanted to deal with the corrosive effects of the famous Huntington thesis article, “A Clash of Civilisations” (2) for a long time, even before the coming of George W Bush presidency. After all, what Huntington was describing was well in place during his father’s reign and the first Gulf War (3), and was further developed and perfected ever since. Here was the new empire, openly eyeing its new potential, no longer playing at being coy about its vast powers and influence – military, political, financial and cultural. Even when writing in 1991 (4), it was clear then that the new empire will have to find and establish the new other, having just lost a long-cherished enemy due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. A proper enemy is the most important commodity of empires – without such an enemy their forces could not be grouped and exhorted into action. The lack of an enemy is of course also lack of funds to fight it, so much is at stake. Only such an enemy can justify publicly the move from a society based (mainly) on the production peacetime commodities, towards a society based on war economy (5 ) and on exploiting disaster-based politics. Instead of offering the citizens safety and security, as they openly profess to do, the new empire offers fear and loathing, a fragile world, where political instability is vying with global warming for destructive power. Utopia, as Frederick Jameson has argued, is not possible under US capitalism – there could obviously be no better society to look forward to – instead, the American dream is dystopian (6); never has this been clearer than in the last decade, with its harvest of dystopian dramas emerging from a Hollywood shaken by 9/11, one dsytopia it could not foresee. While Ronald Reagan started in Hollywood, a career he used well politically, it is George W Bush who looks and sounds as if he where an especially wild creation of a Hollywood scriptwriter, all fiction and no facts.

But behind the propaganda image projected by Bush, stand some intellectuals who are never content to “just study” what the ‘actors of history’ are doing. One of the most influential intellectuals in shaping the new empire, ‘the American Century’, was of course Samuel Huntington, who has been involved with the White House since the 1960′s, as President Johnson’s adviser. His advice has included a strong recommendation to bomb the countryside in Vietnam, as a way of breaking the Vietcong’s resistance. His advice to other presidents since then has been of the same type, and with the same general inclination to conflict over dialogue, and war over coexistence. Since 9/11, his clash of civilizations thesis has seen a keen revival in government and public circles, far beyond the narrow clique of the Republican right wing. So, while the public mood may be panning away from George W Bush, it is by no means moving away from the big project of the American Century, or giving up imperial powers and influence. If, as suggested by many (7) keen observers of US behaviour patterns, this pattern is at least as old as the early days of WW2, then both parties have shared it, and continue to do so, and Bush’s departure is not going to fundamentally change this. The long-term trajectory of the American empire has been in evidence for a long time now, and is just getting clearer as it gets more desperate, with time seemingly running out, and other, newer empires queuing to get in on the action. Thus, what before may have looked like a mere bid for influence, is now clearly what Chomsky (8) has called the ‘imperial grand strategy’, in force since 9/11. This is defined as the means of preventing any challenge to the “power. Position and prestige of the United States.” (9)

[photopress:Bobby_Soldier.jpg,thumb,alignleft]No empire can survive without a credible enemy, and the US is no exception. Enemies can be a moving feast, can change every now and then, as the need arises, but have to satisfy some basic premise. The Soviet Union was a very valuable enemy, not one easily recreated or found. Thus the end of the Soviet Bloc is heralding what Bush the father famously termed the New World Order, but also posed a great difficulty for the American Century project – the lack of a credible, threatening enemy. Huntington thesis is the result of this difficulty, threatening the very fabric of the empire. The search for a new evil was on, and there where few candidates who could fill the big boots of the Soviet Union. The choice was made some time before it became public and commonplace, in such pieces as the Huntington article. It was to be Islam, the civilization chosen for the new crusade, repeating an old historical pattern; Of all the ‘civilizations’ outlined by Huntington, the two he suggests as the most threatening to the American project are the Arabic and the Sinic. Indeed, since his piece was published the fight was on against both, if with different means and intensity, and different ends in mind. It is interesting to note that Hollywood is never faltering to be at the crest of the wave; in 1992, Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula has been launched, with Islam as the Sword of Damocles threatening Europe in Dracula’s tale. This was a mere swallow, which brought a long spring of threats to all screens around the world, and especially since September 2001. The new Satan was all in place to take over from the old one.

An important difference, not immediately understood, between Cold War analysis and the new Huntingtonian threats, was the fact that no longer was the conflict basically a political and ideological one, based on two opposing ways of understanding capitalism, but now the conflict was civilizational, one flowing from the very essential differences between cultures of East and West, of Islam and the Judeo-Christian tradition. That made the conflict un-resolvable, as it depended on the very genetic print of different civilization, the very differences which make them what they are. After all, the west has won over communism by defeating it in the market-place, and saw its scions convert to market economies, unsatisfactory and undemocratic as the process was (and continues to be). In this new conflict, tells us Huntington, there is no halfway-house, no meeting place, no no-man’s-land in the middle, as it is polar, essentialist conflict, with the only resolution being the breaking down and total subjugation of the enemy. Even Huntington does not assume that Islam will change to accommodate the new empire, hence the ferocity of the struggle between two contenders for domination, as struggle in which no negotiation is possible, we are told. Indeed, such negotiation is totally missing, as the thesis has been widely accepted, without the great public debate that such a thesis should have aroused. In this battle, all will be harnessed for a win by the American state, argue Sardar and Wyn Davis – finance, armaments, culture, science and technology – all will be (are) recruited against the new axis-of-evil: “Science has become a commodity, an essential element of the war economy “. (10)

Indeed, such are the differences between both sides, that those very same areas of social discourse and power-management are seen as somehow being essentially western, and Islam being essentially backwards. Needless to say this avoids looking at the very rising of science in Europe, being born as it were from the fertile ground of Muslim Spain, or Andalus, where such scientific developments were the norm, as opposed to the rest of Europe where the Judeo-Christian tradition has crucified, sometimes literally, scientists such as Giordano Bruno and Baruch Spinosa. Thus, the battle between the western Judeo-Christian capitalism, and international Islam is presented as a battle over progress – a real non-analytical, a-historical travesty, powerful and successful nonetheless.

This complex context has been the background against which I wanted to pitch some video experimental work, almost as a cry in the wilderness, not because I or anyone else is in a position to change what Bush might do, but because the UK, under Blair and now under Brown, seems hell-bent on getting its marching orders from Washington, and has bought into the thesis without serious questioning, with the difference between the tow regimes of Blair and Brown being more of style than of content. The work discussed here is designed as an exposition of the likely consequences of the Huntingtonian thesis as a working assumption for political analysis and action. All the more reason for coming up with this concept…

Notes:

1. Quoted in The Guardian, in “Bush is the embarrassing uncle the Republicans just can’t hide” by Gary Younge, August 20th, 2007, p. 25
2. Huntington, S. “A Clash of Civilisations”, in Foreign Affairs, Summer issue, 1993. This was later written into a monograph by the same name, published in 1996, published by Simon and Schuster, New York.
3. See Bresheeth, H. “The New World Order” in H. Bresheeth and N Yuval-Davis (eds) The Gulf War and the New World Order, Zed Books, London 1991, pp 243-256.
4. Ibid, pages 248-250
5. Klein, N. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Allen Lane, London, 2007
6. Sardar, Z. and Wyn Davies, M. American Dream, Global Nightmare: Why Do People Hate America, Icon Books, London, 2004.
7. For example, Bloom, W. Rogue State, Zed Books, London 2003. Bloom himself worked at the State Department, and describes US policy from a position of inside knowledge. Another well-known critic of American imperial designs is Noam Chomsky, whose book Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (Penguin, London 2003) describes a similar outline.
8. Chomsky, N. book Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, Penguin Books, London 2003, p. 14
9. ibid, p.14
10. Sardar, Z and Wyn Davis, M , 2004, p.185

The Production of A Civilised Clash

When writing the script for this production, I had some priorities in mind. I wanted a scene with two dancers, a man and a woman, and for both to move constantly between the two screens I originally planned for. Each new scene will start with the dancers changing screens in a clockwise fashion, creating some circularity and a cycle of action. The dancers were not to meet each other throughout the piece, and their only meeting is the cataclysm at the very end of the film. Halfway through planning, I decided to experiment with working on 16 screens, something I have not done before, and find out more about the potential of such work. This interest was fired by a wish to undermine the single image and its authority, and build a visual and sound structure which was ‘polyphonic’, breaking the dictate of the mater narrative, and suggesting a larger role for the viewer, who will have to decide on a continuous basis where to direct their gaze.The production was to be carried out using the new facilities of the Matrix East Research Lab, at the Docklands campus of the University of East London. The Lab is a unique facility, allowing artists to edit and display up to 36 video tracks in synchronism, and this was the first time the Lab was going to be used. I decided to use 16 tracks for this production, to be shot in the MERL Studio. This would allow me to project and display the 16 tracks in a surround mode, which is what I wanted – the audience would be totally surrounded by images and sounds, and able to make choices about their focus of viewing. Due to the enormity of the topic, I was looking for a configuration which will offer a totality of experience, and show the action from many points of view. The material for the 16 tracks was to be supplied by using at least five HDV cameras, shooting every single take of the seven scenes which I have written for the dancers. The 16 tracks will be created through editing the various takes on each of the cameras.

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The studio ready for shooting

The MERL Studio

The MERL studio is a medium size production space with a floor space of 100 m2. I was planning to both shoot and present the final product within this space, on a screen configuration outlined below, with 14 flat-panel large LCD monitors suspended from the overhead grid, and two very large projection screens onto which high-quality video projectors will project a 12 M2 image. As the screens emit quite a lot of light, I decided on images which will be lit harshly, with jet black background, so as to keep the ‘spilled’ light to a minimum, and allow the images optimum effect in a studio which is basically a black hole.From the start, I wanted two of the cameras to be static, and take the wide picture of the scene without a break, while the other two cameras were to be handheld, and allowed close-up and fluid movement with the dancers; this was necessary in order to create a tension between the two types of materials, adding to the tension between the two large screens, which would include the key images of the male and female dancers, as they move from screen to screenPresentation screen arrangement for A Civilised Clashbetween scenes. The fifth camera, to be operated by me, was to get the overall image of the production, taking in not just the dancers, but also the studio, the cameras and camera-persons. This was necessary for the self-reflexive ending I had in mind.

The dancers, music and work on movement

I had wanted to select two dancers who have worked with each other beforehand, as they would be more likely to easily adapt to the necessary moves and will know how their partner moved even if they did not continuously see them. I was lucky enough to speak with Prof. Lizbeth Goodman about this, and she offered that Bobby Byrne and herself could do this, and performed together many times before. I have already seen Bobby perform before, and very much liked his energy and intensity.

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Lizbeth Goodman and Bobby Byrne

The fact that both dancers were differently disabled was also very important, as I was interested in contrasting the role and the dancer, and this offered very exciting potential. This also helped to choose the music, as both have performed before with the Irish Kila band, and an approach to the lead, Colm, has secured the use of their music which I already knew, and which was ideal for this kind of performance. Some of their pieces have clear Eastern references, such as Arabic, North African and Far Eastern musical character, and this served my purposes especially well.With experienced dancers of this calibre, working on the choreography, something I had little experience in, was relatively easy and most enjoyable. Each of the scenes had to be blocked first in terms of special relationship, and then the specific dance movements would be worked out with the music. The main choices in terms of dramatic developments were made at the pre-production stage, by the script and choice of musical section chosen for each scene, by editing quite a few of the Kila tracks. The movement overall is from birth in the first scene to death and destruction in the last two, so we needed to find the right moves and tempo for each scene, and also weave in some interludes, so that the movement from beginning to end became more elusive and complex, and less pre-destined. I have decided that the final conflict between the militarised west and Islam will be a conflict between a male and female, so as to move away from the standard male body of the Muslim ‘terrorist’, and to complicate the conflict by projecting it onto the gendered set of relationships developed in the scenes before, as man and woman play both their standard, stereotypical roles, as well as their opposites. By making the female body the site of Muslim resistance, I hoped to do away with some of the normalised meanings of the conflict, and give it a depth that it well deserves. This also allowed us to work on some ‘eastern’ elements in the movement, such as ‘arabesque’ hand movements, and belly-dancing movements which were woven in to gradually build the Arab and Islamic ‘other’ against the western style of movement in the other scenes.

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Preparations for a shoot

The work with intense and focussed lighting on HDV video was a very interesting experience, crucial for building the intensity of the scenes, and the relationship between the dancers, which, as they never meet on the screen, depended on the audience, which is placed between them, along the line of sight/gaze. The high contrast created by this type of lighting assisted the conflictual build-up and heightened the tension in all scenes.

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Bobby Byrne in the Objects scene

Because of the lighting angles, movement of the camera-persons with handheld cameras was prescribed and especially difficult, and in need of choreographing together with the dancers, so as not to limit their movement, but still follow it very closely.

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Deveril filming the dancers with handheld camera

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Robin Faure filming the dancers with handheld camera

The short time that each scene lasts – between 80 seconds and 140 seconds – meant that the choice of clothing for each scene was the main and immediate way of signifying change. The changes also signify the developmental and historic aspects of the conflict, and help us to move swiftly through eons, and bring us to the present in the last two scenes. Dance moves are dictated or limited by the clothing, but I found this was a positive quality rather than a limitation, as it coloured the various scenes appropriately. I also wanted to avoid dialogue at all costs, partly due to the fact that there is never any meaningful dialogue between the two adversaries, so meaning was dependent mainly on gestus, rather than spoken words.

The use of nine-screen division

[photopress:multiscreen4.jpg,full,alignleft]The use of dividing the screen area into smaller images is offering a kaleidoscopic effect, somewhat like that in a hall of mirrors, and this was used extensively in one scene, Prayers. The mixture in the presentation space of single and multiple images created what I consider to be a self-reflexive, visual diegetic space, a critical space for the viewer, building new relationships from the picture elements around them, combining them on one single screen,Now that the A Civilised Clash project was shown a number of times in the Lab space, it will be edited into a single screen, as well as a two-screen version, for wider distribution purposes. The work done on the multi-screen version has a pioneering value, and will be presented in the Lab space, until other facilities with similar capabilities become available. Together with Sony Research engineers we are now designing the next stage of the project, which will allow us to travel with production through a lighter, mobile version of the system, so we will be able to show it at other venues of different natures. The experience collected through working on this and seven other multi-screen projects in the Lab space, has clearly shown that it is suitable not only for epic proportion projects, but also to the more intimate type. This knowledge is now used on the new productions currently in preparation.

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Bobby Byrne in the last scene

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Lizbeth Goodman in the last scene

The use of this ground breaking, cutting edge technology for what is a low technology performance piece has created a new, powerful hybrid, capable of dealing with the mythological and the political together, as it were. By projecting a multitude of moving images around the audience, we are enabling and activating them, forcing a Brechtian attitude, and requiring a more active, performative and participatory process of receiving and working out the images and sounds, rather than a passive consumption – a process more akin to this type of material. It is hoped that by further study of this new form/format of media presentation (what are we to call it?…) we may be able to develop the cinematic language which makes full use of the amazing potential of the technology and the setup described here, and bring it to larger and more mixed audiences.

AHRC site reference: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/awards/award_detail.asp?id=324144