kagablog

(namibia-south africa-netherlands, 2002)
50 minutes
super 8mm / digital betacam
written and directed by aryan kaganof
director of photography wiro felix
sound design jane snijders
edited by c.r. mandala
music by virgins, sun ra, john cage, macy gray, alec empire

The South African-Dutch co-production, WESTERN 4.33 (2002, 32min, 35mm) directed by Aryan Kaganof and produced by Wiro Felix, has been selected for participation in the prestigious FORUM of the Berlin International Film Festival. The screening which will take place on 8 February at 20:30 is the first time a South African production has been screened in the Forum since 1994 when Brian Tilley’s In A Time Of Violence was presented.

WESTERN 4.33

SYNOPSIS

B.T. is a truck driver on his way from Johannesburg to Luderitz in Namibia. When he gets there he watches the sunset. He thinks about his great grandfather who perished in the German concentration camp on Shark Island opposite Luderitz. He thinks about his girlfriend who broke up with him. Or he broke up with her? Memory blends the personal pain of heartbtreak with the grand, sweeping pain of history.

Western4.33 is a meditation on the impossible colonial dream; the attempt to “civilize” Africa. The ghost town of Kolmanskop symbolises the failure of the Lutheran pietists to gain a foothold in the densely sensual textures of the world’s oldest desert. The few colour scenes in the film are metaphors for the rich menstrual blood of the African woman who is truly “mother Africa” to the human race.

Digital editing is used by Kaganof to achieve the “slowness” that Milan Kundera has suggested the modern world is sorely lacking. WESTERN4.33 is notable for its sumptuous black and white imagery by cinematographer Wiro Felix and its unusual use of sculptural sound design by Jane Snijders.

LOGLINE

A beautiful meditative statement in Namibia, where the German colonial power established concentration camps early in the 20tth century; a reflection recorded in physical pain and in the collective memory of an unbroken people and culture.

WESTERN 4.33 has previously been awarded the prize for Best Video made in Africa at the 12th African Film Festival of Milan and the Prize for Best Documentary at the 1st African and Islands Festival of Reunion.

this article originally appeared on africultures

Aryan Kaganof’s film WESTERN 4.33 is about the forgotten concentration camps on the west coast of Namibia. This is where the German colonisers imprisoned the Namiban people who were in uprising. “From their Christian churches the Germans could literally see the Herero people dying in the camp on Shark Island. There is no discussion possible about whether they knew it was happening or not. The grim reality behind the project to ‘civilize the natives’ is that they systematically starved these people in camps conceived to kill. An unbelievable contradiction.’

Kaganof has expressed his opprobrium in an experimental, associative, not easy to consume form. For hm it is the only possible manner. ‘I don’t believe that history unfolds its grand narrative outside of us. We internalise historical movements in our emotions and our feelings.’ He wanted to tell the story in a subtle way and force people to think for themselves. ‘I would prefer it if people use the material as a basis for their own reflections and discussions.’

In high-contrast black and white the film shows deserted barracks in an empty, wind-swept desert. Here he cuts in colour images of a woman in slow-motion; this is the other story-line, about a lost love affair. We hear a man’ voice in an African language. What he says is unclear.

‘I did not have it sub-titled because the German colonisers never bothered to learn the Herero language and never understood them.’ This is an alienating device, in the same way as the large letters that tell the grim historical story. Kaganof once again draws a parallel to the Germans who were constantly imposing ther manner of seeing, reading and speaking on the Namibian people.

The 4.33 of the title refers to John Cage, whose composition of the same title consists of silence, or at least the sounds of the auditorium where it is performed. The last two sections of the film, which is edited as a triptych in time, each consist of segments of 4min 33 seconds. The final section is of nothing more than a setting sun. ‘It is important that the audience feel imprisoned while watching this film. Nothing happens, there is no entertainment. You are forced to reflect and experience a fraction of the terror of that imprisonment.’

WESTERN RE-EDITED

Last April WESTERN 4.33 won the First prize at the 12th African Film Festival of Milan. The length of the video version was 50 minutes. The film version has been re-edited and shortened to 32 minutes. In order to get the film onto 35mm a choice was made to reduce some of the formal elements in the film and concentrate on the story of the Herero genocide by the German colonisers. The triptych form was, however, retained. Director Aryan Kaganof: ‘It is as with poetry, this film has its own inherent formal rules.’

-Wendy Koops
international film festival rotterdam daily

Aryan Kaganof
NSA Gallery | Durban

If you read Western 4.33 as a deconstructed documentary of modern Namibia – where the film is set – it is a remarkably astute creation.

A triptych based on John Cage’s silent composition 4’33”, the first segment features the camera lingering on a black man’s face and, in extreme slow motion, following a black woman walking down the street juxtaposed with stark black-and-white landscapes. In the second, silent, section, a grim photograph of skeletal Namibian victims of German concentration camps is overlaid with ribbons of text detailing the deprivations visited upon the native people by the colonisers, while the third component of the film is a 19-minute loop of the sun setting behind a barbed wire-encircled ruin shot in high-grain black-and-white, set to a mind-warping ambient soundtrack.

As a documentary, Western 4.33 breaks many rules and makes up a set of new ones along the way, challenging the genre with its fusion of anti-narrative and wrenching experiential elements. The story is told just as potently and you’re left with a far more visceral sense of ordeal than if it had been presented in traditional linear fashion. In this regard the obvious pretensions of the film’s execution are subsumed into its experience, rendering it a bold incursion of experimental art into the realm of orthodox documentary.

Alex Sudheim

this review originally appeared in art south africa vol.2 #3, 2002

Western4.33 is a great piece of work! I particularly like the sound design. For me it shows through sound, how the “enlightenment” project of the “civilized” world with its constructions of melody and individualism (piano solo from Beethoven onwards) could also be the source of horror. Watching the film for me was like driving through a landscape of conflicting transmissions where silence is both the enemy and the ideal.

Louis Minnaar

This masterpiece by Aryan Kaganof takes its name from the combination of the word “Western” and John Cage’s composition “4.33”. In this way, its director makes a reference to the marriage of popular and avant-garde cinema. I was lucky enough to present this film at its first showing in Paris (though not its first in France) in the presence of its author. Having been awarded prizes in international festivals, it has been officially selected for the 2004 Berlin festival. And it’s not over yet!

On one level we have the interior monologue of a lorry driver who tells us in Zulu of how his girlfriend has left him. We see his girlfriend in slow motion, walking alone in his village. This short scene (to which we return) is the only one in colour, and is filled with pieces of music by Schumann, Alec Empire and Macy Gray. On another level there is a longer theme – that of the country’s colonial barbarism by the Germans at the beginning of the twentieth century. The local Herero population who had risen up against the Germans had been taken by force to concentration camps that existed between 1904 and 1907. Most of the detainees perished there under the worst detention conditions possible.

With these anguished images, oblique angle shots and solid sonorous sculpture, Kaganof surprises us yet again, drawing our attention to this delicate subject which is still relevant today. Avoiding the clichés of the “militant” documentaries of the past, he gives us his fresh humanist vision, which is, above all, aesthetic.

“In ‘Western 4.33’ we find outlined the terrible counterpoint between the tragedy of a near past and the inexorable forgetfulness of the present, thus making actual the horror permanently fixed in the immobility of the past, in reminding us that the past is always present like an accusation…Kaganof’s purpose was to show that the recurring dream pattern is the most convenient image to describe the structure of the memory and to facilitate its understanding…Kaganof’s spectator is asked not to reconstruct a story coldly from the outside but to live it at the same time as the characters and from the inside.” (Immanuel Stammelman, from an unpublished text).

Aryan Kaganof is the leading force in international cinema today.

Dionysos Andronis

translated from the french by lucy lyall grant

Western 4.33, is an experimental documentary about the German concentration camps in Namibia (then South-West Africa) where genocidal strategies were employed and where, to date, the German government refuses to compensate the Herero people for these atrocities.

While the title seems a simultaneous pun on “Westernisation” and the western genre of movies, Kaganof says: “The most cinematic genre in film is the western genre; there is no precursor in theatre or literature and therefore it is most closely tied to what movies are.

“I have always loved the genre and as I studied it, I realised that it was a propaganda machine to substantiate genocide.” Thus the documentary is about the Herero genocide, simultaneously taking on a critique of its propagating genre of cinema.

Kaganof says he has always loathed how we inherit and appropriate United States generic conventions without interrogating them.

The “4.33” references John Cage’s work of the same title, in which a pianist sits silently at a piano for exactly four minutes and 33 seconds. There are exactly four minutes and 33 seconds of silence in Western 4.33.

In US cinema, this dead sound is intolerable as it makes people nervous, says Kaganof, “but I think you should feel nervous in this movie”. It is also a reference to technology version upgrades.

The reuse of footage throughout the movie takes on the interrogation of the documentary format, with its reference to the formalist and concrete filmmaking of the 1970s.

“Memory comes into play — you know what is going to happen, so you are released from suspense and it becomes a moving painting,” says Kaganof. The most striking of this footage is a colour scene in a mostly black-and-white film, in which a woman saunters past a red wall with a group of men sitting next to it.

“The few colour scenes in the film are metaphors for the rich, menstrual blood of the African woman who is truly ‘Mother Africa’ to the human race,” according to a flyer from the 2004 Berlin International Film Festival.

Not a hyperdermic-needle movie that qualifies viewers as instantaneous experts on the Herero holocaust, this metaphoric strand is what entwines the film’s negotiation of the Herero holocaust, the western genre, Westernisation and the documentary into a meditation on the impossible colonial dream of civilising Africa.

nadine botha

this article first appeared in the mail and guardian

recently screened during soft target: concerning war, an exhibition held at the bak:basis voor actuele kunst in utrecht, netherlands

“Aryan Kaganof has curated a soundtrack for WESTERN4.33 that will keep you awake for many nights. Within this soundtrack is 4 minutes and thirty three seconds of absolute silence, a reference to John Cage’s composition for piano wherein the pianist does not play the piano for exactly that length of time. But in western4.33, what unfolds during this terrible silence are the images that Kaganof’s camera has filmed in a deserted concentration camp in the Namibian desert. These camps, built by the German in 1904 and used to decimate the indigenous Herero populaiton served as models for the later, more well-known camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka etc.

To really understand a war, really get to the bottom of its horrors, is almost as impossible in a museum as it is at home watching the news. But sometimes a film grips one by the throat, suddenly, without warning, without the use of any shocking effects. It is ghastly, gruesome, absolutely quotidian and it keeps you rivetted to the screen.”

Leendert Van der Valk
de groen amsterdammer
25/11/2005

here is the original dutch text

“Aryan Kaganof heeft voor western4.33 een geluidsband samengesteld waar je nachten van wakker kunt liggen. Daarin is een stilte opgenomen van vier minuten en 33 seconden, verwijzend naar John Cage’s compositie 4min33sec waarin een pianist even lang niet speelt. Ondertussen lijkt Wiro Felix’ camera gevangen in de barakken van een verlaten concentratiekam in de Namibische woestijn. Omgeven door het felle licht van de woestijn, de kampen, waar de Duitse bezetter vanaf 1904 genocide pleegde op het Herero volk, stonden later model voor Auschwitz. Een oorlog of geweld doorgronden, echt begrijpen, lukt niet zo min in het museum als op de bank zitten tijdens het journaal. Maar soms grijpt een film ineens naar je keel, zonder waarschuwing, zonder schokkende beelden. Het is gruwelijk, verschrikkelijk, alledaags en je wilt blijven kijken.”

Leendert Van Der Valk

De ingrijpende film van Aryan Kaganof (in Nederland vroeger bekend als Ian Kerkhof), getiteld Western 4.33 (2003), kan als voorbeeld dienen van beelden die dwingen de toeschouwer haar zintuigen aan te passen op weg naar een nieuwe vorm van waarnemen. In de film lopen twee verhaallijnen door elkaar: de in kleur en ’slow motion’ gedraaide scène van een jonge, alleen lopende Afrikaanse vrouw, een verbroken liefdesrelatie suggererend, en de in zwart/wit beelden gefilmde, verstilde beelden van een veel pijnlijkere geschiedenis, die van het Namibische Hetero-volk dat door de Duitse kolonisator in concentratiekampen werd gedecimeerd. Kampen die later model zouden staan voor de kampen in Auschwitz en Treblinka.

De titel, refererend naar het Amerikaanse populaire filmgenre waarin genocide op een ander volk synoniem werd voor heldhaftig gedrag, en de over het beeld aflopende teksten waarmee de film aanvangt, laten niets aan het toeval over. Kaganof’s film bevindt zich in het goede gezelschap van Godard’s Notre Musique (2004), een filosofische en filmische meditatie over de huidige tijd en zijn ‘eindeloze destructieve energie’ met als tegenwicht de tegendraadse positie van kunstenaars en intellectuelen.

Ine Gevers, Review exhibition and debates, BAK Utrecht, Metropolis M, nr. 1, februari 2006.

this review was published on the net here

for more russian language information about western4.33 please click here

Не смущайтесь, когда в титрах увидите, что режиссера зовут Арьян Каганофф. Это Ян Керкхоф, вернувшись на родину в Южную Африку, встретился со своим настоящим отцом и взял его имя и фамилию, чем в конец запутал своих немногочисленных последователей. Не смущайтесь от слова “Вестерн” в названии: известно, что суть вестернов - не перестрелка на главной улице, а невозможность жизни человека в пустыне. Режиссер подходит ко всем знакомому жанру с неожиданной стороны. “Вестерн - самый кинематографичный жанр кино. До кино этого направления не было ни в театре, ни в литературе, то есть вестерн ближе всего подходит к самой сущности кинематографа. Мне он всегда нравился, а во время учебы в академии кино, я понял его суть. Он есть ни что иное как пропагандистская машина для оправдания геноцида”. Название фильма отсылает также к знаменитому произведению Джона Кейджа “4.33″, в котором пианист сидит за роялем в полной тишине ровно 4 минут 33 секунды. Две последние, медитативные, части фильма длятся ровно по 4 минуты 33 секунды.

“Вестерн 4.33″ - это медитация на тему насилия и концентрационных лагерей в Южной Африке, снятая в канонах таких кино-экспериментаторов, как Годфри Реджио или Майя Дёрен. Из бессвязных образов - пустынных дорог с уродливыми растениями на обочине, сараев, огражденных колючей проволокой, крупных планов африканца в шапке Fila, из разнородной музыки - от Шумана до серфа, Мэйси Грэй и Алека Эмпайра, Каганоф создает политический и поэтичный коллаж о призраках прошлого, не покидающих странное место на стыке пустыни и океана, намибийский город Лудериц, где в начале ХХ столетия тысячи африканцев сгинули в немецких концлагерях.

In Western4.33 we find outlined the terrible counterpoint between the tragedy of a near past and the inexorable forgetfulness of the present, thus making actual the horror permanently fixed in the immobility of the past; in reminding us that the past is always present like an accusation.

Western4.33 is a study in persuasion, and one which involves the audience as much as the people on the screen; and it is a work in which the technique and the action are quite literally fused. Form and content, the thing expressed as opposed to the way of expressing it, on this occasion become quite meaningless terms.

Western4.33, if written as a novel, would certainly seem nothing like as audacious or challenging as it does on the screen. Subjective time, recurring time, the gradations of reality and experience, are nothing strange to the modern novel. But film can accomodate them more easily - or more suggestively; and since its essential ingredients are space and time it can manoeuvre in both at once, make both relative to its own purposes.

In giant steps (2005) Kaganof explores time and memory from a fixed point of reference. Here there is no fixed point, and consequently Western4.33 imposes its own time on the viewer.

The meaning of the film is not in some aphorism which you can bring out of the maze with you, but in the process of exploration, this containing of possibilities. Objective explanations can be sought but not imposed. We are being given not a comment on “reality” but a series of mirror images, with the idea that this is how we apprehend - not reality, for that goes beyond the film’s definition, but whatever it is we apprehend.

Kaganof has never definitively stated that Western4.33 is a recurring dream. His purpose was to show that the recurring dream pattern is the most convenient image to describe the structure of the memory and to facilitate its understanding. All apparent discrepancies become natural in such a pattern, where the dreamer (or day-dreamer) is more or less aware of his previous dreams, in which he already remembered some anterior dreams, and so on, as a mental corridor of mirrors.

Kaganof’s spectator is asked not to reconstruct a story coldly from the outside, but to live it at the same time as the characters, and from the inside.

-Immanuel Stammelman

LA GAZETTE
du 7e festival des cinémas différents de Paris
lundi 12 12 2005

FRONTIÈRES
sur la séance d’Aryan Kaganof

Dans Western 4.33, l’horizon penche, les arbres poussent à l’envers. L’univers est de guingois. Dans le lieu où nous transporte Kaganof, l’harmonie du monde a été rompue. Vitres brisées, peinture écaillées : on croit découvrir un village à l’abandon. Il ne se passe rien dans ce paysage immobile et pourtant la musique, violente et aqueuse, est bien celle d’un drame. Puis apparaissent les premiers barbelés, en quantité croissante, en gros plan ou de loin, délimitant le terrain qui ressemble de plus en plus à une zone interdite et maudite. Kaganof filme à travers les trous du grillage, il colle à présent à une frontière conçue pour déchirer les corps. Des éléments troublants s’accumulent : une église baptiste surplombe une falaise acérée, des inscriptions allemandes, en lettres gothiques sur ces murs s’élevant au milieu d’un désert…Sur une photo d’archive qui constitue le dernier plan, l’on voit des hommes noirs squelettiques qui fixent l’objectif. Namibie, 1904-1907. Camp de concentration allemand. La frontière s’étend et se transforme. Frontière psychique évoluant vers une forme matérielle, elle demeure le centre d’une œuvre qui interroge sans cesse la capacité humaine à créer des espaces d’enfermements, pour soi ou pour les autres, en soi ou dans le monde.

Caroline Ferando-Durfort

« Western 4.33 » a déjà été projeté par nous lors des «jeudis du CJC », le 27/11/03.
Peu de temps après, il entrait en section officielle à la Berlinale 2004.
Le chiffre 4.33 du titre serait une référence directe à la composition éponyme de John Cage tandis que le mot «western » nous prévient de l’endroit désertique où se déroule l’action. Un désert qui n’est pas celui d’Amérique mais de la Namibie. Le monologue en afrikans, interprété par le célèbre chanteur sud-africain Zola, nous raconte comment notre héros camionneur a été abandonné par sa copine, qui revient en flash-back, et comment son grand-père a péri au camp de concentration qui sera la fin de son trajet. Cet ancien camp de concentration, en ruines aujourd’hui, avait bien existé entre 1904 et 1908 pour accueillir les révoltés contre les colonialistes allemands de la même époque. Le mixage musical énergique est vraiment très impressionnant et vient en contraste émotionnel avec le thème du désert, de l’abandon et de la mort.

dionysos andronis

Western 4.33
Aryan Kaganof, Pays-Bas, Afrique du Sud, Namibie, 2002, n&b/couleurs, 32min, VO (dialecte namibien)

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Western 4.33
Il existe plusieurs types de films documentaires revenant sur des événements historiques, chacun mettant en place des stratégies esthétiques diverses pour rendre compte de leur sujet. Ainsi, peut-on passer d’un régime purement pédagogique à des tentatives plus radicales, questionnant, outre l’Histoire, la possibilité d’en parler ” en cinéma “. Le film d’Aryan Kaganof participe clairement à la seconde catégorie. Son objet, peu connu : les camps de concentrations que les colons allemands avaient construits au début du XXe siècle en Namibie. Le film se déplie, se déploie en une tentative de réactivation, de remémoration visuelle et intellectuelle de cette réalité-là. Un ” essai ” sensible, d’une richesse et d’une inventivité formelle, à voir absolument.