Frame of Accountability
Film/Installation Series Written and Directed by Helene Kazan
15min Episodes
To be premiered by The Vera List Centre, The New School, New York in 2021
15min Episodes
To be premiered by The Vera List Centre, The New School, New York in 2021
Surface noise of archival documentation used as evidence of enacted violence, 'Frame of Accountability', 2021.
‘Frame of Accountability’ tells the story of the little-known events that take 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 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 a contract of ‘risk’ created by these events as 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.
Recontextualising risk, the story is told through a complex of human and non-human voices that give testimony to the disproportionate affect of the burgeoning technology of capitalism and conflict. Undoing a temporal and spatial distance constructed in distinguishing violence as environmental or conflict based. The account concludes in an extra-international legal hearing that uses radical legal and creative methods to invert the coloniality of law’s authority. Producing a precedent that not allows normalised forms of international violence to become visible, but in the process dismantles the further capacity of its perpetration. Produced around this legal fiction, the non-linear nature of the episodes unravel a complex condition, registering missing narratives, and underlining the fragmented nature of their acknowledgement. Can the accidentally discovery of an archive amount to enough evidence to rewrite the political, legal and economic legacy of a violent history of resource extraction? Can the register of this international violence create a more inclusive, accessible and reparative conceptual framework of accountability in international law?
Frame of Accountability is part of supra-disciplinary and practice-based research project led by Helene Kazan, realised through film, installation, writing and public engagement. The project investigates ‘risk’ as an integrated limit condition of conflict and capitalism, analysed at the intersection of international law, architecture, and the human experience of violence foregrounded through 'poetic testimony'. The project draws on feminist and queer critical (legal) theory, using methods of ‘poetic testimony’ in the process. Poetic testimony engages necessary and radical forms of poetics in expressing and translating the experience of violence. These methods are employed in the attempt at breaking the deadlock of continued cycles of international violence, in part legitimised through international law’s restrictive conceptual framework of accountability.
Episodes
(Un)Touching Ground
In Complex View of her Body
In Law’s Terms
Credits
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.
Recontextualising risk, the story is told through a complex of human and non-human voices that give testimony to the disproportionate affect of the burgeoning technology of capitalism and conflict. Undoing a temporal and spatial distance constructed in distinguishing violence as environmental or conflict based. The account concludes in an extra-international legal hearing that uses radical legal and creative methods to invert the coloniality of law’s authority. Producing a precedent that not allows normalised forms of international violence to become visible, but in the process dismantles the further capacity of its perpetration. Produced around this legal fiction, the non-linear nature of the episodes unravel a complex condition, registering missing narratives, and underlining the fragmented nature of their acknowledgement. Can the accidentally discovery of an archive amount to enough evidence to rewrite the political, legal and economic legacy of a violent history of resource extraction? Can the register of this international violence create a more inclusive, accessible and reparative conceptual framework of accountability in international law?
Frame of Accountability is part of supra-disciplinary and practice-based research project led by Helene Kazan, realised through film, installation, writing and public engagement. The project investigates ‘risk’ as an integrated limit condition of conflict and capitalism, analysed at the intersection of international law, architecture, and the human experience of violence foregrounded through 'poetic testimony'. The project draws on feminist and queer critical (legal) theory, using methods of ‘poetic testimony’ in the process. Poetic testimony engages necessary and radical forms of poetics in expressing and translating the experience of violence. These methods are employed in the attempt at breaking the deadlock of continued cycles of international violence, in part legitimised through international law’s restrictive conceptual framework of accountability.
Episodes
(Un)Touching Ground
In Complex View of her Body
In Law’s Terms
Credits
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.