A Flick­er­ing Truth

Even though Pietra Brettkelly’s A Flick­er­ing Truth is direct­ly con­cerned with the sys­tem­at­ic destruc­tion of Afghanistan’s poor­ly main­tained and under­fund­ed film archives, the doc­u­men­tary itself looks at the death of 35mm film the world over. Tal­iban forces view cin­e­ma as an affront to their regres­sive creed, a pro­mot­er of tawdry sex and irre­li­gious sen­ti­ment. As such, film needs to be burned, the earnest expres­sions of past gen­er­a­tions trans­formed into smoul­der­ing ashes.

Civ­il war rav­ages the coun­try, and so cul­tur­al her­itage slips down on the ​“to do” list. But by allow­ing these films to sim­ply dis­ap­pear would be to recon­fig­ure his­to­ry, to expunge ethe­re­al evi­dence of real peo­ple and real events. In the name of pre­serv­ing their total­i­tar­i­an val­ues, the ter­ror­ists are push­ing to cre­ate their own counter-fac­tu­al his­to­ry, one which bol­sters their ideals above all else.

Ibrahim Ari­fy knows this, and wants to use his mod­est podi­um as tem­po­rary head of the Afghan Film Archive to make what­ev­er inroads he can to sal­vaging not only a vast cul­tur­al cache, but the tumul­tuous recent his­to­ry of his bat­tle-scared coun­try. We meet him at an archive that has been ran­sacked and pos­si­bly fire-bombed as he secures local labour­ers to sift out film cans from the detri­tus. He takes the films which look like they’re in decent knick and checks to see what’s on them. There’s lots of news­reel from the days of the Shah which stretch­es to the Taliban’s rise to pow­er, when the very act of using a cam­era trans­formed from being artis­tic to political.

A Flick­er­ing Truth seeks to present the ways that film is more valu­able than just a week­end sport for lucky bour­geois dandies, a form of mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion and visu­al poet­ry. Ari­fy com­ments how cen­sor­ship laws became so strin­gent that film­mak­ers would fight back by cap­tur­ing real tragedies and refram­ing them as fic­tion, so their work would con­tain a dan­ger­ous edge of doc­u­men­tary real­ism. And yet, one archivist claims that the allies them­selves would burn truck-loads of film as a cheap way of mak­ing it look like the Tal­iban were even more wild­ly destructive.

The sit­u­a­tion in Afghanistan means it’s under­stand­able that film archives are get­ting short shrift, but such is the case the world over. The cost of preser­va­tion is too high, as one beloved art­work rots away inside its can or is acci­den­tal­ly thrown into a dump­ster. The film is about how we need advo­cates to keep the medi­um going, peo­ple will­ing to spend seri­ous amounts of time (and in this case, place their well­be­ing on the line) to fur­ther the cause.