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Fugitive Images: Select Works by Andrea Luka Zimmermane
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Second Run Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (2nd December 2024). |
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The Film
 "A selection of vital works from filmmaker, artist and cultural activist Andrea Luka Zimmerman, the first director to be shortlisted for both the Grierson and Jarman Awards. Situated between documentary and fiction, these films challenge political and structural injustice, working with marginal communities to assert our shared humanity. "This 2-Disc Blu-ray Special Edition includes their multi-award-winning feature-length films, Taşkafa, Stories of the Street (2013), Estate, a Reverie (2015), Erase and Forget (2017) and Here for Life (2019), plus a selection of their acclaimed shorts and documentary works. The set also includes appreciations by curator Gareth Evans and filmmaker Penny Woolcock, plus a 48-page booklet with essays by So Mayer and Ali Smith, plus writing by Andrea Luka Zimmerman." Taskafa, Stories of the Street: The street dogs of Istanbul are more than mangy mutts, lying about the walkways of alleys and town squares, they are pets, protectors, playmates, and confidantes of shop owners, the plaza regulars, and children. They are seen by the human populace as friends and as performing a public service for which they are fed and receive affection. Taskafa: Stories of the Street - named after the late king of the dogs - reveals as much about the individual dogs as it does the people who speak about them, look after them, and express their fears about the gentrification of old Turkish squares into upscape shopping centers and neighborhoods into luxury living through their worry about what will become of the dogs. The narration includes passages from a poem by John Berger, the late art critic who also provided a reading for Zimmerman's documentary Estate, a Reverie.  Estate, a Reverie: Written off as a "problem estate" in the seventies and called "the heroin capital of Europe" by a journalist in 1990, the Haggerston Estate has been on its last legs for almost thirty years without a caretaker and maintenance by the efforts of its tenants (including documentarian Andrea Zimmerman herself for seventeen years). The estate stopped accepting tenants in 2004 and was scheduled for demolition starting in 2009. Zimmerman's documentary is a portrait of the remaining tenants of the final block Pamela House (after the Samuel Richardson heroine) in 2014. Rather than focusing on the political aspects of gentrification and marginalization, Estate, a Reverie is exactly what the title states: a survey of the individual tenants and families, some of whom keep to themselves, others seen in social clubs, giving impromptu artistic performances (some of them not always welcome), even sharing stories of the old days across generations and ethnicity, and the ways in which they have transformed their worlds without the oversight of maintenance and tenancy guidelines. The structure gives way to readings by art critic John Berger.  Erase and Forget: You may not have heard of Bo Gritz, but you have certainly heard of "Rambo" who was inspired by "the most heavily decorated Green Beret of the Vietnam Era." Zimmerman and her camera follow Gritz through a series of public appearances promoting the army, Special Forces, and gun shows and his role as the pseudo-spokesman (and entertainer) of his desert community intercut with his more solitary (lonely?) home life as he relates his life story as his own story, Hollywood myth-making (and a bit of his own myth-making), the image built up of him by his own fans and "Rambo" fans, and the image of him that suits the people who pay him for guest appearances (even when they put him literally on the sidelines with a small audience of army hopefuls whose naive enthusiasm he does not even try to temper with the reality of what he has seen and experienced). He describes with pride his experience in Vietnam where his A-Team got their ahead of the American army and had a separate experience of the war, and the similar experiences he had returning home to protesters and alienation from his own family. He remained steadfastly proud of his country and his work – including celebrity-funded returns to Vietnam to search for Americans left behind with different results from the films about the subject – but increasingly found himself surrounded increasingly by fringe groups and exploited by parties wearing the flag of patriotism and oddly selective of where "small government" applies. Even if it is hard to agree with all of his stances, there is something of the older relatives in the family one charitably describes as "out of touch" and hopes is more sincere than others one would label disingenuous for the same sentiments. The film does not end with an epiphany or a reckoning, just a man overshadowed by his own image without perhaps entirely realizing it. The documentary also includes an interview with First Blood director Ted Kotcheff who laments the series turning Rambo into a killing machine with subsequent entries.  Here for Life returns to the territory (figuratively) of Estate, a Reverie but the space is more nebulous and the threat to it looms but is "unspoken" in the titular slogan of Dominus, the property investment group buying up buildings that form the backdrop of the daily lives of a diverse group of who seems connected not so much by physical proximity as deep emotional wounds that they express to one another, to the camera, and to the world through commiseration, ranting, and performances both on the street as sketches that attract the real-life police and to a communal audience. The inner lives of these people dealing with addiction, domestic violence, mental health, loss, familial estrangement and more unfold to the camera directly and indirectly, and Zimmerman leaves it to the viewer not so much to deduce or diagnose as empathize. Although Zimmerman – who has lived in the community for over a decade – stays behind the camera, there is an additional layer of "telling" these stories on a visual level with some sustained shots of individuals or groups that embody a sense of environmental portraiture in public places or private spaces (whether or not they might have been curated to better reflect their personalities for the presence of the camera). 
Video
The four films are split between two BD50 discs which each feature their own selection of short films by Zimmerman and a few extras. Taskafa, Stories of the Street and Estate, a Reverie were previously released by Second Run in 2017 together on DVD. The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.78:1 widescreen Blu-ray transfers run 4% slower than the PAL DVD at the correct framerate – for films shot and finished at 25fps/50i, Second Run has retained that framerate and encoded at 1080i50 – while Erase and Forget and Here for Life are debuting here on Blu-ray. Taskafa, Stories of the Street looks the roughest visually in terms of its general videography; although Zimmerman privileges people over images, the other films look slicker overall in their original footage with the inconsistencies coming in the form of archival video and film material. 
Audio
Audio for all four features is LPCM 2.0 stereo with burnt-in English subtitles for foreign dialogue and some English dialogue where the volume of the original recording is an issue. There are no added effects and most of the music is part of the source including singing by the collaborators. HoH subtitles might have helped with some of the diverse British accents (and possibly some of the American ones to British viewers). 
Extras
Disc one accompanies Taskafa, Stories of the Street and Estate, a Reverie with trailers (2:31 and 2:36, respectively) as well as a series of shorter works. "I am Here" (4:26) and "More Utopias Now!" (3:17), the latter a humorous and creative piece in which a child dressed as Thomas More walks around his schoolyard interviewing classmates about their concepts of a utopia. "Birdboy and the General" (14:51) is a creatively-visualized fable featuring a puppet interacting with children as the narrator tells a tale of villagers scavenging and reusing the refuse of a despot who consistently prizes the new and novel as observed by an outcast who wants to fly and becomes a curio himself. "Shelter in Place" (19:05) is a triptych visualization of the daily life of a performance artist who became "unhoused" during the 2020 Covid lockdown and took up shelter in a public park which also became the site of his art. "Civil Rites" (27:56) is a day long tour of the city focusing on the sites of civil resistance, some of which are monuments and others had their meaning "buried" by their utilitarian function or public usage. "Art Class" (49:57) is the link between Estate, a Reverie and Here for Life and, indeed, features collaborators from both films (it might have been a good idea to put both films and this piece on the same disc) as Zimmerman reflects on reactions to a lecture on her work that she was invited to give at the National Gallery in front of painting drawing criticism about whether or not she is an artist and causing her to (a bit facetiously) inquire into making art versus being an artist. The title could just easily be "art and class", "art + class", or "art/class" as she, some experts, and some of her collaborators whose lives have been shaped and reshaped by their ability to engage in different types of creative expression almost in defiance of such definitions of art and the artist. Further tying this piece into the two aforementioned film is Zimmerman's discussion of the polar concepts of old signifying useless, obsolete, and disposable in contrast to new and fresh with regard to both the housing estates being demolished for new structures as well as the people marginalized by extension of these concepts. The disc also has a trailer (1:34) for Art Class. "Merzschmerz – Four Short Films" observes the way children draw meaning and significance from stories – in this case, four pieces by Kurt Schwitters: "Lucky Hans" (8:29), "A Good Man" (1:41), "The Flying Fish" (4:55), and "Once Upon a Time There Was a Tiny Mouse" (2:22) – which they recollect aloud to the camera or to a parent. Disc one closes with an appreciation by Penny Woodcock (4:19) who points out that Zimmerman's subjects are not given a voice, they already have a voice – hence their the approach in which the collaborators and their remarks structure Zimmerman's work rather than a more conventional interview format – the importance of listening and her own reaction at finding joy rather than just suffering in films about marginalized people.  On disc two, Erase and Forget is accompanied by a trailer (1:42) while Here for Life has a teaser and trailer (4:21) and a short behind the scenes (3:49) which gives insight into the "staging" of the film including one of the collaborators Errol giving Zimmerman behind the camera a tour of the area as defined by his usage of it and the people he regularly encounters. There are also two music videos by Zimmerman "Wayfaring Stranger" by Fern Maddie (5:59) and "Gelem Gelem" by Balamuc (3:44). "Sounding the Voices" (54:50) is a radio program in which Zimmerman describes the concept of "sound work" which is part spoken, part musical, but overall a variation on "call and response" as a "scoring of witness." Zimmerman asks the question "how have you kept going" leading to a series of responses (rather than answers) and we are not sure whether they are a natural progression or have been separately recorded and edited as a "scoring" but it is the audio analog to Zimmerman's video approach. The disc closes with an appreciation by Gareth Evans (23:59) that feels like a dense discussion due to Evans' quick and breathless delivery but he does underline several of the themes that not only concern Zimmerman and her subjects – with whom she has lived for nearly two decades – but have become increasingly of increasingly anxiety to the world at large: a "poetics and politics of being in the world" in the face of various threats to a sense of place, and space as locus of trauma and its individual and group expression through a more democratic definition of art. 
Packaging
Although the Zimmerman interview from the Second Run DVD edition was dropped, Art Class is perhaps more informative in her casual address to the camera the ideas she is exploring but the DVD edition's 24-page booklet has been doubled in length, carrying over the essay by Ali Smith about restoring the communality or the "shared-eye nature" to the image, and short pieces by narrator John Berger while substituting the pieces by academic Colin Dayan and OpenDemoncracy editor Rosemary Bechler with a new piece by writer/curator So Mayer exploring the themes of Zimmerman's work inquiring and resisting the structures that maintain dominant modes of seeing, a piece by Zimmerman and co-director Adrian Jackson on the making of Here for Life, as well as film- and short-specific short essays by Zimmerman.
Overall
The title Fugitive Images is very apt for the work of Andrea Luka Zimmerman which is a continuous process of seeing and listening rather than to voices that are always there but otherwise ignored.
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