DOXBOX Damascus Diary 3
No, they don’t know it or them, says Orwa Nyrabia, one of the DOX BOX organisers, when I doubt him stating that the audience to the seminar of French academic Martin Barbier, ”Back to Basics”, had never heard about ”Nanook of the North” or its director Robert Flaherty.
DOXBOX has thus not only an actual role to play by presenting new films, it also wants to educate an audience and invite them to know about the history of documentary film.
Barbier served that purpose when he talked about sound and documentary and showed clips from all the classics, especially from a French point of view. Among others the wonderful Clouzot film about Picasso, which is available in all Fnac shops in France. And Alain Resnais and Chris Marker.
After the screening I asked a couple of young Syrians if they learned anything. One of them answered immediately: Yes, Nazis suck… She referred to the clip from Leni Riefenstahl ”Olympia” and to the last clip from Claude Lanzmann´s ”Shoah”!
In the afternoon one more look at ”3 Rooms of Melancholia” by Pirjo Honkasalo. I have seen it several times and yet it makes a big impression one more time. There are not many documentary filmmakers like Pirjo with such a humanistic commitment and such a courage to do a different and much more poignant narrative. She makes the rest of the documentariands look like pedestrians.
Read more at: www.millenniumfilm.fi/2004_melancholia.html
