Resistance

Resistance is a 16mm colour feature film (90 minutes). It assembles fragments of raw material (archive film, performances, music, historical and psychological contradictions) and attempts to make a whole. The historical focus of the film is the French Resistance. Although the film deals only intermittently with the Resistance, it does describe quite faithfully the way in which ex-resistors render up their past in terms of ready made mythologies.
Resistance is a film asking questions, eg:
(i) To what degree is history a statement of wish or conscience?
(ii) What is memory, what is history – and is there any relation between the two?
(iii) What is the relationship between a film that records an event and the reality of that event?
(iv) How far is a product of conscious and unconscious censors?
(v) What is the contribution of psychoanalytic or marxist techniques in helping to understand the forces behind the course of events?
Twenty hours of psychodrama shot on 1″ video tape produced the performance material (50 minutes of the finished film). This part of the film was made in an isolated location where the participants spent a week working through and re-analysing their performances in an attempt to merge elements of their own personalities with the fictional roles imposed on them. A practising psychoanalyst took part in this.
The other sections in the film are made up of archive footage and work using back projection and re-filming. Any black and white material was tinted. Various processes of transferring film to video and video to film were used.
Resistance was performed by Stuart Brisley, Marc Chaimowicz, Ian Kellgren, Lesley Pitt; Anna Koply, Arnold Linken, Elizabeth Richardson;