Frame of Accountability
3 part film Written and Directed by Helene Kazan
To be premiered by The Vera List Centre, The New School, New York in 2020.
To be premiered by The Vera List Centre, The New School, New York in 2020.
Surface noise of an archival document used as evidence of enacted violence, 'Frame of Accountability', 2020.
‘Frame of Accountability’ tells the story of the little-known events that took place in the Allied invasion into Vichy French controlled Lebanon and Syria in 1941, as under the legal guise of ‘military necessity’ two foreign forces fight for control and access to natural resources in the territory. The accidental discovery of Top Secret British government documents in the personal archive of General Spears (the first British Minister of Lebanon and Syria) reveals the violent ambition behind the British military campaign in 1941 and the (neo)colonial mechanisms of governance put in place in the years following. The film foregrounds the contract of ‘risk’ created by these events as part a colonial technology imposed in the racialised consequence of decontextualising resource commodities through capitalist financial systems and violent modes of conflict. Resource commodities are disconnected from bodies, land and context to enter financial markets that rationalise its capital value. International laws of war and aerial bombardment become the violent process and action undertaken by strong states to secure sovereignty, control and power over bodies, land and resource.
This film re-contextualises this condition of risk, by telling the story of these events through the voices, bodies and land disproportionately affected by a burgeoning technologies of capitalism and conflict. In this way, the film undoes a temporal and spatial distance constructed in distinguishing violence as environmental or conflict based. This is as embedded technologies of law and risk-taking speculate and project present and future threat, both as the coming war and the coming storm, experienced as an interconnected and uncontrollable limit condition that falls outside of international law’s conceptual framework of accountability. The film reveals how constructed present and speculative futures felt through a global condition of risk are rooted in a political, legal and economic legacy, produced through a violent history of resource extraction. Can the accidentally discovery of the archive amount to enough evidence to rewrite this history of violent affect? Can an extra-international legal hearing on the human and non-human effects of this history of colonial violence break a deadlock in international law’s framework of accountability?
Credits
Part 1:
Written and Directed by Helene Kazan
Cinematography by Jad Youssf
Human/Non-Human Archival Modelling by Anabel Garcia-Kurland
Sound Design by Mhamad Safa
With the support and special thanks to The Vera List Centre, The New School, New York.
This film re-contextualises this condition of risk, by telling the story of these events through the voices, bodies and land disproportionately affected by a burgeoning technologies of capitalism and conflict. In this way, the film undoes a temporal and spatial distance constructed in distinguishing violence as environmental or conflict based. This is as embedded technologies of law and risk-taking speculate and project present and future threat, both as the coming war and the coming storm, experienced as an interconnected and uncontrollable limit condition that falls outside of international law’s conceptual framework of accountability. The film reveals how constructed present and speculative futures felt through a global condition of risk are rooted in a political, legal and economic legacy, produced through a violent history of resource extraction. Can the accidentally discovery of the archive amount to enough evidence to rewrite this history of violent affect? Can an extra-international legal hearing on the human and non-human effects of this history of colonial violence break a deadlock in international law’s framework of accountability?
Credits
Part 1:
Written and Directed by Helene Kazan
Cinematography by Jad Youssf
Human/Non-Human Archival Modelling by Anabel Garcia-Kurland
Sound Design by Mhamad Safa
With the support and special thanks to The Vera List Centre, The New School, New York.