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 الى اللقاء، آرثر هاويس...
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(***)
Am I writing to you from the " other side " of the world, Arthur Howes?ii
Are you reading this, as a crowd of laughing gods and dancing goddesses drag you towards the gates of a beautiful world you could have never imagined, until the 29th of November? ii
Is the world of hereafter resembles the colourful paintings you were leafing through, sitting at your kitchen table? ii
Or am I offending your restless soul, as you now look to the world of down here with anger, agitation and despair? ii
Will your desire to change this world ever be subdued by death? ii
Are you wrestling now with your unfulfilled yen to capture it with the real, yet artificial, eye of the lens?! ii
Is the world really down-here , where I am, and you are not? Or is it somewhere else, Arthur Howes? ii
Have you elevated, transformed into dust and basic elements, or you simply seeped into everything and have become everything? iiWill your soul, if it ever hovers above the skies of down here , float above Gibraltar, over Brixton markets, Kakuma Camps, above the Brazilian beaches of Salvador, or the Mountains of the Nuba? iiAnd… have you seen, can you, meet my father? iiii(You must be asking why I think you have all the answers now for all the questions you shared with me one Saturday evening. I shyly told you that I knew nothing about God, but this shimmering hope that I desperately wish to transform into a solid belief. I'm asking myself the same question, Arthur Howes, with the same fading hope.) ii **** I still get emails from your Hotmail address! One of them talked about "your" funeral arrangements on Friday the 17th of December. It was signed by your friend Richard. ii It is Friday, and I did not go the service. It wasn't an anti-religion stance, (although your funeral is indeed a perfect occasion for English cynicism.) I went to the aftermath of that: a British gathering over food and wine, to celebrate you, not to morn, to remember you, with love, and shun death's heavy weight on life. ii The bouquet of flowers I chose for you rested nicely a few meters away from your home, near the play-ground built for the kids of Brixton. The same kids who disappointed you the other day, when you realised they cared less about the greens than they did about anything else in their harsh, ever changing neighbourhood. ii Your Brixton kitchen was jammed with a colourful crowd of your friends, from all over the world. Even I, the dusty boy from Khartoum, seemed colourful enough to fit into the international scene. One of the Rahals was present. Inshrah, without her baby Fatma, was there too and faced an embarrassing cultural-conflict incidence that would have made you laugh if you were there. ii Were you there? Then you must've heard my voice repeating Inshrah's words to Richard, that we hope to stage a night of your Sudanese films. Not even the Nubas of London know about Kafi Story or the Nuba Conversations. I have no big hope that we will get all the exiled Sudanese activists, or the crowds of refugee families to gather in a community hall to watch our painful realities, in film. ii You must've also seen my confused and not-so eloquent walk into your editing room, trying to find something... what was it, Arthur Howes? the eerie presence of Benjamin or his brother? Kafi's haunting voice? or was it the ghost of the filmmaker him- self? ii the self that was always so discreet, in the best tradition of social realism in British documentary filmmaking, the understated voice of the filmmaker. I now miss your voice, terribly ... ii hafiz kheir
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Re: الى اللقاء، آرثر هاويس... (Re: farda)
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Arthur Howes
Documentary-maker passionately involved in the griefs of Sudan
Jeffrey Geiger
Tuesday December 7, 2004
The Guardian
Arthur Howes, who has died aged 54 from lung cancer, was an award-winning filmmaker. iiAs an expert on the Sudan, he was often asked for his views during its recent years of political crisis. His documentaries, iimost of them made on tight budgets, were screened on Channel 4, iiacclaimed at international festivals and are taught on film courses the world over. ii
Filmmaking was only one facet of Arthur's talents ii (he painted, spoke five languages and was a charismatic storyteller), iibut his films are his chief legacy, revealing passion and respect for the people he filmed and for cinema itself. ii
His films show keen sensitivity and a knack for engaging people, whether he was working in Brixton (his home for 30 years), the Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, or Brazil in Bacchanalias Bahianas. ii
He was born and educated in Gibraltar, and migrated to London to find the intellectual and creative stimulation that he craved. He did art and teacher training at Furzedown College, applying his avant-garde interests to experiments with super-8 cameras. ii
In the mid-1970s he did a BA in film studies at the Polytechnic of Central London, where he made Threatened Assassins, a deft fictional work that was influenced both by French New Wave and genres like film noir.
Arthur was unafraid to challenge the filmmaking status quo. He had been a teacher in Kadugli, Sudan ii (1980-82), iiand in 1984 he brought his experimental technique to the National Film and Television School. ii
Under the tutelage of Colin Young, he came into his own, showing a strong affinity for the fluidity and immediacy of the vérité style of Jean Rouch and DA Pennebaker. He made, with Amy Hardie, Kafi's Story (1990), about Sudanese labour and migration from Torogi in the south to Khartoum. ii
It won the BP Expo/BBC Documentary Award, the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival award and other prizes. ii
Despite this, funding was never easy to find and Arthur bemoaned the funding culture at institutions such as the BBC, where documentary seemed to be valued only if it had heightened dramatics, voyeuristic intrusion, and the heroic presence of on-camera directors. ii
Arthur had a great love for celluloid aesthetics, but adapted brilliantly to digital technology. The filmmaker, carrying his camera, could now move across borders with the ease of a tourist, and Arthur took full advantage of this, making Oromo - Human Rights (1996) in Ethiopia and Kenya, and Nuba Conversations (2000), in the Kenyan refugee camp at Kakuma and across the war-damaged regions of Sudan, where 60,000 Nuba children had been abducted to "peace camps" and then forcibly recruited into the Sudanese army. ii
Nuba Conversations showed Arthur's gift for putting people of all walks of life at their ease; his empathy for human suffering; iihis hatred of injustice; and his unwavering photographic eye, which captured life in all its beauty and tragedy. ii
The Village Voice called it "searing journalism and a document of what has to many western eyes remained an invisible cataclysm". A Nairobi screening helped inspire UN ceasefire talks between the Sudanese government and the SPLM (Sudanese People's Liberation Movement). ii
Benjamin And His Brother (2002) returned to Kakuma, further tracing Sudanese displacement and forced migrations. It follows two young men in their attempts to emigrate to the US; iionly one manages to secure visas for the journey, iileading to a painful separation. iiBenjamin found wide success, including screening at New York's Margaret Mead Festival, the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, and Brixton's Ritzy. ii
Arthur, always interested in other media, was visual director for the multimedia shows Kaddish (1995) and Physical Cinema (1999), mounted by the avant-garde group Towering Inferno; produced videos for the "krautrock" band, Faust; and did installations for London nightclubs. ii
He taught film for years at Brixton College, and also held posts at Essex University, Napier University, Edinburgh, iiand the London College of Printing. He was an inspiring teacher who encouraged students to make documentaries as far afield as West Africa and Ethiopia, and wrote scholarly pieces on documentary history and theory. ii
Arthur's last, unreleased, work is a meditation on his battle with lung cancer while in Bahia, Brazil. iiHighly experimental, it visualises his deterioration in health, as the camera becomes progressively heavier and the images grow increasingly painterly and static. ii
In many ways it brought his life and career full circle, returning to the world of the African diaspora, ii to the pleasures of light, food and the body; ii and to the sea, which he always associated with his beloved home, Gibraltar. ii
He is survived by his son, Eli Hardie-Howes. ii
Arthur Christopher Joseph Howes, filmmaker, born July 15 1950; died November 29 2004 ii
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� Copyright 2001-02
Sudanese
Online All rights
reserved.
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farda
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست