"Episode III: Enjoy Poverty"

Episode III: Enjoy Poverty
Dir. Renzo Martens, Holland, 2008, 90 min.


My first screening at this year's Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montreal (RIDM) was "Episode III: Enjoy Poverty," which was followed by a discussion (in French):

Media images of poverty : Humanitarian or exploitive? Moderated by Michel Coulombe.

The film featured Martens as he travels through the Congo ostensibly with the goal of informing the impoverished that their largest export is their poverty, since that is where their greatest revenue comes from (humanitarian aid). He brings along with him a large (English) neon sign that reads "Enjoy Poverty (please)," which he displays in the poorest of villages. He encounters diverse interview subjects along the way including: European photographers, starving children, men who work for negligible amounts of money while their children die of malnutrition, the owner of a plantation whose workers are paid starvation wages, patrons at an art gallery that sells photos of these workers, UN soldiers sent into the region to quash the people's militia, men who run a small photo business for parties and weddings, a woman who works for a UNICEF, a white man who works for a gold company, doctors without borders management, other doctors, etc.

The film's strength lies in it's provocation and reflexivity. The director adopts a persona, quite like Michael Moore's, through which he takes dramatic measures point out the hypocritical use of the images of African poverty shown in Europe and N. America. It is provocative because the author puts forth the (satirical) thesis that if the Congolese are to recognize poverty as a resource they would be smart to use it to their advantage by taking control of its production. This idea is illustrated when Martens finds out how much European journalists are making for each photo they sell to their publications, and then he proposes to the local party photographers that they would be more economically savvy were to go into the business of photographing "corpses, raped women, and malnourished children." They take photos and bring them to the management of doctors without borders who refuses them access to the facilities because they are attempting to profit from their photos of poverty, while, he says, the European journalists are bringing news to the world. The double standard is quite evident.

The reflexivity in the film is of an ethical nature. The filmmaker critiques those who document Congo's poverty at the same time as he does it himself. The film is also a performative documentary in so far as the relationship between the production of images and the consumption of them is at issue perhaps more so than the particular situations of the interviewed subjects.

At the end, the filmmaker brings food to the family of a man who we met at the beginning, a man whose children are starving to death before the camera. The man is incredibly thankful. He feels recognized, and obviously takes the gesture as a sign that he may be helped out of his situation. Martens asks the man if he has a TV, running water, electricity, anything, and the man replies, no, you see I have nothing. Martens asks how long he has been working for the plantation, and the man replies, 10 years. Martens then tells the man that nothing will change for him. It seems an almost savage act of cruelty to feed a starving family on meal an then tell them there is no hope, but as an allegory it is quite effective. The truth is that this is precisely what humanitarian aid does: it feeds the hopeless for one day and continues to work within and to some extent support the system that serves to oppress the people. To say that it is otherwise, the these people are being helped in any significant way by the money and food sent to relieve their suffering, would be a convenient falsehood designed so that those who support these global systems are not required to change the way they live so that those are failed by it presently may one day be have control over their own labor and resources.

I wish that my French was better because the discussion with the director of the film, an activist from Africa (Assiz?), locally acclaimed filmmaker, Robert Morin, and a couple other men, whose names I didn't catch, seemed quite interesting. Morin loved the film, saying "bravo" to Martens twice. The African activist was very eloquent in his articulation of the difficulties facing the poor in Africa and their representation, garnering applause from the audience several times. There were a few questions from the audience that revolved around a concern with the use of performance, what they called "fiction," in the film. (When these questions come up for a performative film like this one, I find it very frustrating that people equate narrative, performance, and staging with deception. There is an element of these three devices in even the "purest" [whatever that might mean] documentary. My question is always: does the form serve to hide a truth or truths, or to bring out new or hidden truths not accessible through conventional methods? And, does the device call attention to itself in a way that puts it's indexical, or representational value in question, so that the audience is "in the know" regarding the filmmaker's choices?) Martens pointed out that he played this part so that the real hope for these people would be revealed, as opposed to a continued adherence to policies that have already been proven to fail the people. So, in this way, he has used the non-fiction research about the ineffectiveness of humanitarian aid to create a representation that can "tell the truth" to the necessary audience in a new way that might help them understand (since the old ways have not). Overall, the film was very well received.