THIRUVANANTHAUPRAM: Maverick Ethiopian filmmaker, and the leading light of Los Angeles Rebellion Film movement, described Hollywood cinema as the “new Hydrogen Bomb”. “Globally, Hollywood has made zombies of suppressed people in the interests of the American people,” Gerima said while delivering the Aravindan Memorial lecture at IFFK on Tuesday. He has a radical way of defining his relationship with cinema. "I don’t love cinema, I hate cinema,” Gerima said. “How can I love cinema when it has been used to disfigure my people,” he said, alluding to certain oppressive cultural notions popular films have spread. “I am interested in the equipment because I can tell mine and all stories that have been banished from the world,” Gerima said.
According to him, Hollywood feeds on a new class the imperialists have created after the Second World War, the middle class. “There was the capitalist, the feudalist, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpen proletariat... But the middle class was a new construct,” he said. "This is a buffer class, the consumer class who does not aspire to change,” Gerima said. He painted th picture of an inert group, kind of epicureans more interested in leisure and self-comfort, and excited about watching people doing unbelievable things. “Majority of filmmakers come from the middle class who love spectacle films,” he said.
This is a vicious cycle. Spectacle cinema creates subdued humans and from this batch of “anti-critical” humans emerge new filmmakers. He said these filmmakers don’t question the status quo. “That is why the vocabulary of oppression of women comes from mainstream cultural expressions,” Gerima said.
According to him cinema should provide a cultural diet that creates stronger human beings. But he said that there were formidable obstacles to the growth of protest cinema. Gerima, who is doing a film on Italian atrocity against Ethiopians, himself has encountered seemingly insurmountable problems. “Italians are unwilling to share footage of soldiers killing my people. Most Italians want to forget what I don’t want to forget,” he said.
