The anti-G8 protests in Germany’s Heiligendamm in the summer of 2007
were a significant climax of leftist movement practice. And not least
for the reason that they proved that the anti-globalisation movement
some six years after 9/11 has by no means come to an end. The myths of
Genoa and 9/11 as a double catastrophe and the beginning of a decline
of the social movements in the summer of 2001 have proved themselves
wrong. The metamorphoses of the movement are multifarious, and
fractures cannot be dismissed either, but not in the sense of a
decline, but in the sense of ruptures and transformations, of
inventions and recompositions, of the search for new forms of political
organisation and social concatenation.
What would it mean to
win? is the title-giving question of the film by Zanny Begg and Oliver
Ressler about Heiligendamm and the most current aspects of a social
movement. Other questions resonate behind it: Is it actually possible
to win? And before that: Against whom? And still more abstractly: Does
anyone actually want to ‘win’? It is a basic statement of the film that
‘winning’ in the form of a united, revolutionary subject and the taking
over of state power has no great future. Rather the ‘We’ that asks
itself the question as to what it means to win, has to accept the form
of a question, the form of an undefined movement, stumbling and
stuttering, like the music in the cartoon fragments in Begg’s and
Ressler’s film that complement the pictures of actions and theoretical
commentaries with playful reflections.
Just as this
fragmented, multitudinous ‘We’ evades every definition and every
organic representation, it also makes sense that Begg and Ressler –
instead of dwelling on the spectacular riots in Rostock at the
beginning of the summit or on the media-effective Greenpeace actions
along the coast of Heiligendamm – immediately plunge into the depths
of the micro-political fabric in the fields and camps around the G8
summit. The pictures and original sound that the two artists have
captured of the actions and social forms of organisation around
Heiligendamm are impressive, not only in content but also in the
careful and exact way in which they are presented on film. Particularly
convincing are the picturesque images of the blockades and the attempts
to break through the police lines in the far hinterland of
Heiligendamm; above all, the pictures of the effectiveness of the ‘five
finger tactic’, the strategy of the repeated division of larger groups
upon contact with the police lines until their gaps finally lead to
breakthrough – a strategy of the active scattering of non-conforming
masses in the wide meadow landscapes on the East Sea.
These
dispersions, unfoldings and duplications also correspond to the claim
of the film borrowed from Zapatism that life does not have to mean the
same film every day but on the contrary every day a new one. Instead of
affirming the one world of global capitalism, but also without claiming
that only one other world is possible, it is a matter of inventing many
worlds. This implies for one thing the creation of other worlds but
also the concrete actualisation in the here and now of every day a new
film, an infinite film programme, an infinite programme of the
invention of worlds.
Emma Dowling, one of the six protagonists
of the film refuses accordingly to answer the subjunctive question as
to the meaning of winning, by interpreting the movement currently in
the making in Heiligendamm as winning: Her comment ‘We are winning!’
refers to the extended present of coming together, exchange,
discusssions in the camps, the delegitimisation of an illegal power
such as that of the G8, but also to the proliferation of this current
development in the daily routine beyond Heiligendamm, into the everyday
struggles dictated by racism and sexism, into situated knowledge and
local discussion.
The very actions of Heiligendamm, their
aesthetics and form could be interpreted as citations from the time
around 1968: this could be partly unconscious or partly ironic, for
example when a block of the ‘naked power’ – some twenty naked men and
women almost rubbing shoulders with the shields and truncheons of the
robocops’ lines – chant the slogan ‘Anyone who touches us is a
pervert’. What is being commented on here and treated with irony -–more
or less affectionately – is both the media construction and the
uncompromising reality of machistic Black Blocks, such as hit the
headlines a few days previously in Rostock, and also the Woodstock
tradition of staging quasi-innocent nudity.
The more recent
forms of action like samba bands, anti-G8 cheerleaders and clowns
armies coincide with aesthetic-political records of practices in the
1960s. Begg and Ressler take up the aesthetics of these actions and
transport them right into the formal aspects of their film. The film
begins with Bob Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind, interpreted by a
mouth-organ activist and ends with the scene of two tambourine women in
the camp (the gender-technical adaptation of Hey, Mr Tambourine
Man!), creating a double Zeitgeist (1968-2007) whose dissociated and
at the same time empathetic innuendo fortunately is not lost. In
contrast to the Social Forum it is not Gilberto Gil standing here, or
more appopriately perhaps Joan Baez on a large stage; the film on the
contrary offers a stage for micro-political practices, and
aesthetic-political ways of existence. It is here that the strength of
Begg and Ressler’s film lies in comparison to other examples of visual
representation of the anti-globalisation movement: not to denounce but
rather to enhance aspects of counter-information and
counter-propaganda, at the same time building in several levels of
reflection which avoid hammering home an all too simple solution.